timewasting (again)

i watched the stupidest movie last night: jason x. you know, based on those friday the 13th movies with the guy called jason voorhees who kills people with a machete and is unstoppable (although in the first movie the killer is actually his mother, avenging his death by killing camp crystal counsellors, and trying to keep the camp closed, so why jason became the killer- and a pretty demonic, supernatural one at that- i'm not sure. o wait, he came back to avenge his mother's death. how cyclic. how deep. how stupid.) this was possibly the worst movie i've ever seen. i'm not sure why i watched the whole thing (okay,i channel-surfed, but still), other than i was trying to see if it was ever going to get better, only it kept getting worse. it wasn't even bad in a cheesy, funny kind of way. it was just bad.

so, the plot of jason x (courtesy of DVD Verdict):
Jason is hanging about at the Crystal Lake Research Facility while a battle of words rages over whether to take him away for further evaluation or freeze him solid in the Facility's cryogenic chamber. The former view prevails, but Jason doesn't cooperate; he naturally gains the upper hand and quickly manages to dispatch half a dozen guards. Things don't all go Jason's way, however, and in seeking out the rest of the Facility's staff, he manages to allow himself to get maneuvered into the cryogenic chamber where he's frozen solid.

Some four hundred years later, a scientific party exploring a no-longer inhabitable planet Earth stumbles across the Facility and discovers the still frozen Jason. They take his body aboard their spacecraft and proceed to try to resuscitate him, completely unaware of who he is. Once unfrozen, Jason immediately grasps the situation, remembers his schtick, and starts in on murdering the entire crew of the spacecraft.


In my role as your faithful reviewer, I really want to save you from this turkey, so here are a few of the things you'll be able to avoid by not seeing it. Let's see, there's the plot stolen from Alien and a dozen other imitators; the usual collection of stabbings and skewerings (including one on some sort of giant drill bit); a woman's head flash-frozen and then smashed into a million bits; a machete that manages to penetrate steel as though it's papier maché; a scientific party that comprises a dumb head scientist and a collection of half-clothed students who seem barely out of puberty and possessed of a collective IQ of about 60; the usual dumb people that go off down dimly-lit corridors on their own; a character who seems like he wants to be Jar-Jar Binks (the bright spot being that he gets killed off while we all know Jar-Jar's still alive and kicking); cheesy special effects including a collision between a spaceship and a space station which apparently has no contingency plan in place for such an possibility; the usual derivative sound track composed of swooping, pulsing music every time something supposedly ominous is going to happen; and the pièce de résistance, in which Jason becomes his own heat shield as he enters the local planet's atmosphere. There is also some choice dialogue that is quite descriptive and, in itself, perhaps tells you all you need to know about the film: At one point, the ship's engineer intones, "You weren't alive during the Microsoft conflict. We were beating each other with our own severed limbs." I have no idea what it means, but the screenwriter must have thought it was real witty. See, didn't I tell you the film was a comedy?

At another point, one of our intrepid student scientists comments "This sucks on so many levels." Imagine, a film that provides its own review. Too bad they didn't use it in the film's advertising, as a warning to the unsuspecting.



i know, i should have written my own review, but this one is better, and i'm lazy, and my computer keeps freezing, and i'm lazy damnit.