Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This
Speaker 1: is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And Hey,
Speaker 1: this is the one hundred film selection on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: And we're we're marking the occasion by finally entering a
Speaker 1: new century, a new millennium of film. Um, we're we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about our most recent film yet, the
Speaker 1: twenty two year old Jason X. Now it's Friday on
Speaker 1: the day of this episode releases. Uh, and of course
Speaker 1: it being our hundredth episode. I feel like these facts
Speaker 1: were significant robbed in your suggestion of Jason X for
Speaker 1: for today's episode, But I think it's an excellent choice.
Speaker 1: Not so much because I think it's like a great
Speaker 1: movie or one that I've I'm going to tell people
Speaker 1: they must go out and see, like I would say
Speaker 1: about Inframan or Ship of Monsters. There's some of the
Speaker 1: other ones we've we've looked at that are just you know,
Speaker 1: you just want to share that joy with the world.
Speaker 1: It's not really in that category, but I think it
Speaker 1: will be fantastic fun to talk about. And I also
Speaker 1: think It's a great choice because it's a movie with
Speaker 1: a literal three word plot summary. What's the elevator pitch
Speaker 1: on Jason X. It's Jason in space? Right, it is
Speaker 1: known character in previously unexplored setting. Very Dracula goes west. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's looking back on it, it's easy to
Speaker 1: think this was a no brainer. Of course, Jason goes
Speaker 1: into space. But another thing about this movie is that
Speaker 1: not only does the character known to us by by
Speaker 1: the point this movie came out go to a new location,
Speaker 1: the character is himself changed by the journey because this
Speaker 1: is the movie where Jason becomes a cyborg. One of
Speaker 1: the taglines featuring on posters for Jason X was evil
Speaker 1: it's an upgrade. Yeah, it's um. I mean, there's so
Speaker 1: much fun in this movie because it is like a
Speaker 1: character from one genre stepping into another genre, bringing all
Speaker 1: of his own tropes with him, but then also encountering
Speaker 1: all the tropes of the genre that he is stepping into.
Speaker 1: Uh So, it's it's there's so many idea Like you
Speaker 1: can imagine that the writing process and the brainstorming process
Speaker 1: for this was was pretty rich with ideas. It's a
Speaker 1: ten car pile up of genre cliches. Now, I thought, Rob,
Speaker 1: you you found the link to Roger Ebert's half star
Speaker 1: review of this film. It was not even a whole
Speaker 1: star for him, uh, and I thought it might be
Speaker 1: good bye by referencing some of the things he says
Speaker 1: about this He begins by quoting a line of dialogue
Speaker 1: from the film, which is this sucks on so many
Speaker 1: levels in the movie, literally referring to a whole pressure
Speaker 1: breach in a spaceship where characters are at the risk
Speaker 1: of being sucked out into into the void. But Ebert
Speaker 1: goes on to say, quote rare for a movie to
Speaker 1: so frankly describe itself, Jason X sucks on the levels
Speaker 1: of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness,
Speaker 1: and aptness of thought. Only its title works. Now, I
Speaker 1: think that's that's maybe a little overly harsh, but I mean,
Speaker 1: I want to recognize that my my appreciation for this
Speaker 1: movie is an appreciation that is tempered by the context
Speaker 1: of my relationship with the rest of these movies and
Speaker 1: my knowledge of horror cliches. I'm not going to like
Speaker 1: defend Jason X deeply on its own terms. Or say well, no,
Speaker 1: it's actually good. Yeah. Yeah, this this review actually gave
Speaker 1: me pause when I was revisiting this film as a
Speaker 1: potential Weirdhouse selection, because I look back and I saw, oh, gosh,
Speaker 1: half a star. I don't. As I've said before, I
Speaker 1: don't always agree with with Ebert's reviews. Sometimes I agree
Speaker 1: with them, you know, pretty wrongly. Sometimes we're on on
Speaker 1: different planets. And I was suspecting it might be the
Speaker 1: case here. But I was like, maybe there's something I'm
Speaker 1: misremembering about this film, and I really need to go
Speaker 1: back and view it again. Before I even suggested Joe
Speaker 1: that we we cover it. Um. Yeah, I ended up
Speaker 1: disagreeing with Ebert on on a lot of this, But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I've got some kind of like you,
Speaker 1: I can't say I'm not going to defend Jason X
Speaker 1: on storytelling and character development or any of these other
Speaker 1: categories either beyond this, you know. Ebert notes that the
Speaker 1: movie opened on the sixteenth anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown. Um,
Speaker 1: and then he says the movie is basically a rehash
Speaker 1: of Alien, where I think that's quite unfair. Only about
Speaker 1: a third of it is a rehash of Alien, and
Speaker 1: the other parts are transporting Friday thirteen tropes into space,
Speaker 1: and then the last third of it is a rehash
Speaker 1: of Aliens, the sequeled Alien. But you know this, so
Speaker 1: the Monster stalks crew members in in dark spaceship corridors,
Speaker 1: picks them off one by one. You can't see the
Speaker 1: similarity except here, of course. The Monster is not an
Speaker 1: original design like the Xeno Morph, but the by the
Speaker 1: year two thousand one quite familiar figure of Jason Vorhe
Speaker 1: is a big lug in a hockey mask with a
Speaker 1: machete who just kills people for some reason. What are
Speaker 1: the strangest things about how people reacted to this movie
Speaker 1: when it came out? Uh? Is that I remember something.
Speaker 1: I was just in high school at the time, but
Speaker 1: I remember some people being like Jason in Space, Okay,
Speaker 1: they've gone too far. That's just silly, you know, like
Speaker 1: as if there were an important core of realism and
Speaker 1: seriousness that the Friday thirteenth franchise had maintained up until
Speaker 1: this point, only to cast it aside by going going
Speaker 1: full edwood and allowing an undead revenant to board a
Speaker 1: rocket ship. I would say, not only is this premise untrue,
Speaker 1: I think sending Jason into space and turning him into
Speaker 1: a nanobot cyborg actually elevates the series in a hole,
Speaker 1: and I want to sort of explain how I mean
Speaker 1: that in a roundabout way. But first I want to acknowledge,
Speaker 1: as we did in our previous episode on Jason Takes Manhattan.
Speaker 1: So this is our second film in the Friday the
Speaker 1: thirteenth franchise we've covered. Uh. Despite the fact that these
Speaker 1: movies are for the most part, I admit, quite poorly
Speaker 1: made by most measures, maybe apart from makeup effects in
Speaker 1: in some installments like like the first one and so forth. Um.
Speaker 1: And despite the fact that they were nearly universally panned
Speaker 1: by critics, Friday was and is immensely popular up until
Speaker 1: just recently. I think it was the highest grossing horror
Speaker 1: franchise in history, and I think for a while, certainly
Speaker 1: in the eighties and nineties in the United States, if
Speaker 1: you went up to a random person on the street
Speaker 1: and you said, think of a horror movie villain, I
Speaker 1: suspect the answer you would be most likely to get
Speaker 1: would not be Dracula or Frankenstein or even Pizzuo Zoo.
Speaker 1: It would be Jason Vorhees. For some time, the hockey
Speaker 1: mask became the symbol of the horror genre, which is crazy,
Speaker 1: right if you're approaching this from a from a sports standpoint, right, Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's kind of weird that such a
Speaker 1: thing ended up in these movies to begin with. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is just a piece of sports equipment. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: a film critic like Roger Ebert or any number of
Speaker 1: others might think of the Friday Thirteenth movies as uninteresting, predictable,
Speaker 1: or formulaic, kind of mindlessly violent and puerile, uh, just
Speaker 1: generally ranking low in I don't know, artistic innovation and
Speaker 1: stuff compared to a lot of other great spooky horror
Speaker 1: movies that that that do much better on those accounts,
Speaker 1: And in fact, I have no way to disagree with them.
Speaker 1: But something about these movies kept audiences coming back. And
Speaker 1: as I think I also said in the Jason Takes
Speaker 1: Manhattan episode, I find the Friday the Thirteenth movies and
Speaker 1: movies like them kind of psychologically revealing, like in the
Speaker 1: same way that it is revealing when people tell you
Speaker 1: about their dreams. It's like you're peeling back some membrane
Speaker 1: that usually kind of filters your thoughts for maturity and uh,
Speaker 1: tastefulness before you share them with other people, and instead
Speaker 1: you're just looking straight into the filmmaker's id. Now, when
Speaker 1: it comes to the predictable or formulaic nature of these movies,
Speaker 1: you can try to history where the series does sort
Speaker 1: of keep trying new things in a way, like in
Speaker 1: parts two through four, those are all in a way
Speaker 1: just pretty much the same. Jason is a mad slasher
Speaker 1: who it attacks a house full of misbehaving eighteen to
Speaker 1: twenty somethings. Uh. Then that that kind of gets played out, Uh,
Speaker 1: they start switching up the formula. In part five, there
Speaker 1: is a twist where it's not Jason at all, but
Speaker 1: it's a copycat killer. In part six they really switch
Speaker 1: things up by introducing the soup or natural because it's
Speaker 1: only in part six that Jason now is a re
Speaker 1: animated corpse with powers that seem to include super strength
Speaker 1: in vulnerability and teleportation. In part seven they switch it
Speaker 1: up again. This is the one where they have Jason
Speaker 1: face off against a final girl with the power of telekinnsis,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of Jason versus Carrie that it's pretty fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Part eight, which is the one we previously covered on
Speaker 1: the show, they try to switch it up by changing
Speaker 1: the location. So this is Jason Takes Manhattan, a movie
Speaker 1: that is mostly about a boat. They should have called
Speaker 1: it Jason Takes Boat. But then he has a few
Speaker 1: brief scenes in Vancouver, which and there's one where they
Speaker 1: actually shot it in Times Square. Also a lot of fun, yes,
Speaker 1: And another piece of context outside of the uh, the
Speaker 1: fictional movie canon, sort of the real world context is
Speaker 1: that up until about part seven, the series was a
Speaker 1: money printing machine. You know, you could make a movie
Speaker 1: on the cheap for like two were three million dollars
Speaker 1: and then make twenty million dollars in ticket sales. But
Speaker 1: after part seven, box office returns started to become more disappointing.
Speaker 1: I think Jason Takes Manhattan had a slightly uh more
Speaker 1: disappointing return, and that trend would continue with the next movie.
Speaker 1: So in part nine, Jason goes to Hell, things get
Speaker 1: really weird in a bad way. There's some plot about
Speaker 1: like there's like a little little rat snake demon that
Speaker 1: lives inside Jason and can jump into other people's mouths
Speaker 1: and possess them so they become Jason, but they just
Speaker 1: look like whatever actor it's jumped into. Um. But like
Speaker 1: many people, I find Jason Goes to Hell just unwatchable,
Speaker 1: excruciatingly gross, unpleasant, hideous visuals, awful music, not really much
Speaker 1: redeeming at all, except for uh, some some brief but
Speaker 1: excellent weird vibes from the actor Steven Williams, who plays
Speaker 1: a bounty hunter on the trail of Jason Vorhees, which
Speaker 1: is a hilarious concept to be in with. Uh, but
Speaker 1: I also believe that he's the character who introduces the
Speaker 1: concept of a magic dagger to the series canon. That
Speaker 1: one would be And I don't think I've ever watched
Speaker 1: Jason Goes to Hell and full but I've just seen
Speaker 1: like some clips that you've sent me. But like this
Speaker 1: one seems to be a case where the title really works,
Speaker 1: Like Jason goes to Hell. That that that sounds like
Speaker 1: a bold new direction. That sounds like Jason is venturing
Speaker 1: into the underworld, into the afterlife. They're gonna be demons.
Speaker 1: Who knows what else it's gonna contain. No, it's just
Speaker 1: another slasher movie, but like grosser and less funny than
Speaker 1: than previous ones. And most of the time Jason doesn't
Speaker 1: look like Jason. He just looks like somebody walking around
Speaker 1: and then they look in a mirror and it's Jason's reflection.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Like they couldn't even have the possessed individual
Speaker 1: have this, like this compulsion to put on a hockey
Speaker 1: mask or something not that I recall. So that one's
Speaker 1: really bad. Um. But then come so here we're coming
Speaker 1: up on the tenth film in the franchise. Uh, any
Speaker 1: returns of started being not so good. Um not like
Speaker 1: the series ever had like real artistic integrity. But I
Speaker 1: think even from a critical appraisal point of view, like
Speaker 1: the movies are getting less good. Um. So the concept
Speaker 1: was relatively empty and vulgar to begin with, and attempts
Speaker 1: to vary the formula have been made, and the last
Speaker 1: movie is just this anti fun bucket of slop. So
Speaker 1: what what are you going to do next? What are
Speaker 1: you gonna do? Where can you go from here? And
Speaker 1: I think you've got a couple of options, especially at
Speaker 1: the time this was made, because they're developing this in
Speaker 1: the late nineties. Uh, this is after Scream comes out.
Speaker 1: So one option you have is you could sort of
Speaker 1: do what Wes Craven did with Scream, do the movie
Speaker 1: equivalent of the mirror self recognition test and create a
Speaker 1: film that acknowledges or even satirizes the conventions of the
Speaker 1: genre to which it belongs. But another option is to
Speaker 1: just spread the wings of absurdity and take flight. And
Speaker 1: Jason X does a little bit of the former, but
Speaker 1: more of the latter, And in doing so, I think,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that it's not actually a great movie,
Speaker 1: it performed a kind of retroactive benediction upon the earlier films,
Speaker 1: acknowledging that yes, these movies like have always been exactly
Speaker 1: this ludicrous. Jason X made the earlier movies feel less
Speaker 1: violently sadistic and more like overt grand gueniall in camp.
Speaker 1: It is the space Buddies phase of the property. Uh
Speaker 1: you know. Jason X breathes this innocence back into the
Speaker 1: subject matter, kind of stupid innocence, and Friday Thirte becomes
Speaker 1: what it was always meant to be. And personally, I
Speaker 1: think they should have kept going in this direction and
Speaker 1: made movies where Jason becomes Santa Claus like in the
Speaker 1: Tim Allen sense, he is caught by the Santa Claus
Speaker 1: and he's forced to become St. Nicholas and deliver presence,
Speaker 1: or he's drafted by the NFL according to Airbud style loopholes.
Speaker 1: But alas that is not what we got. I have
Speaker 1: to understand that the pitch meeting for for the or
Speaker 1: maybe not the pitch meeting, but the initial brainstorming for
Speaker 1: Jason X involved a number of different concepts. I think
Speaker 1: that like they talked about doing like like Christal, like
Speaker 1: what if they did Jason in winter you know, like
Speaker 1: it's Crystal Lake camp, but it's winter time, so I
Speaker 1: don't know, Jasons to kill people with icicles or something. Uh,
Speaker 1: sounds pretty solid, But they didn't. They didn't do that,
Speaker 1: and they started coming up with these crazier ideas. And
Speaker 1: part of the reason they ended up going with something
Speaker 1: futuristic was that they knew that Jason versus Freddie was
Speaker 1: more or less in the pipeline and that was going
Speaker 1: to be coming up more or less next so they
Speaker 1: didn't want to do anything that would get in the
Speaker 1: way of that. I don't know why you need to
Speaker 1: get too worried about that. Clearly, like logic film, the
Speaker 1: film in the Friday the thirteenth series. Well, weirdly, I
Speaker 1: would say, so far the films actually did maintain basic continuity,
Speaker 1: like they all acknowledge the ones that had come before.
Speaker 1: Once you get Ason X, that kind of all goes
Speaker 1: out the window. And I think that may have been intentional.
Speaker 1: It may have been like, well, this one is going
Speaker 1: to get so absurd and go so far afield that
Speaker 1: audiences will no longer expect the films that follow to
Speaker 1: maintain continuity with it. Yeah, like this is this is
Speaker 1: shooting so far ahead into the future that it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what the next Can Friday that thirteenth movies consist of.
Speaker 1: But to your point, it's it seems kind of shocking
Speaker 1: that they didn't keep going. Uh in this vein with
Speaker 1: with Jason that we didn't get the Santa Claus of
Speaker 1: the NFL concept or something equally ridiculous. It's really a
Speaker 1: shame we we did not get that stuff. But I
Speaker 1: should also note one last thing. Despite everything I've just
Speaker 1: said about my own opinions, Jason X was of course
Speaker 1: also panned by critics, not just Ebert but generally, and
Speaker 1: also did very poorly at the box office, so it
Speaker 1: did not save the franchise in terms of money returns. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was also released at a very weird time. It
Speaker 1: came out November two thousand one, which I don't know
Speaker 1: who wanted to see a Jason movie. Then it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of weird to figure out where people stand on
Speaker 1: this movie, because on one hand, this is a movie
Speaker 1: that I had a favorable opinion of, uh and still
Speaker 1: have a favorable opinion of. I think it's a fun film.
Speaker 1: It's a film that has been recommended to us for
Speaker 1: Weird House before. People have written in and said you
Speaker 1: should do Jason X. And if we said we're gonna
Speaker 1: do a Friday the thirteenth, they're like, oh, is it
Speaker 1: Jason X. So um. You know it has its followers.
Speaker 1: When I go on to letterbox dot com and I
Speaker 1: pull up our episode list of the different films that
Speaker 1: we've covered in Weird House, if I sort by popularity,
Speaker 1: it is the fifth most popular film that we've talked about.
Speaker 1: And yet at the same time, you go somewhere like IMDb,
Speaker 1: and I know IMDb user ratings um and not not
Speaker 1: the gold standard perhaps, but it only has a four
Speaker 1: point four out of ten on there, So I guess
Speaker 1: enough people think it is bad or or actively dislike it,
Speaker 1: But it's hard to tell how much of that too
Speaker 1: is like it's a sort of so bad it's good
Speaker 1: sort of view of things, and even though they're giving
Speaker 1: it a low rating, they still have a higher opinion
Speaker 1: of it. Well. I think it's the kind of movie
Speaker 1: where just the concept, like just the sheer force of
Speaker 1: the concept and the fact that this concept was followed
Speaker 1: through on to production and release is enough to take
Speaker 1: it like most of the way there, Like at that point,
Speaker 1: you're not super concerned, like, uh, you know, is the
Speaker 1: script really that clever, like or the actor is good.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of like it's Jason in space and
Speaker 1: they actually made it. That's not just a joke. And
Speaker 1: the crazy thing about it is that it's the sort
Speaker 1: of concept where it could easily work better as a
Speaker 1: trailer than a movie, but because the energy, it might
Speaker 1: be hard to keep that energy up. But I feel
Speaker 1: like the movie does keep that energy up. They're able
Speaker 1: to actually keep you engaged with this ludicrous concept throughout
Speaker 1: the run. So, speaking of let's let's hear the trailer audio.
Speaker 1: You're gonna hear a lot of the snappier lines from
Speaker 1: this film. In the trailer in the year, on a
Speaker 1: routine training mission, a team of students is about to
Speaker 1: discover a life form frozen in time. Wow, they're on
Speaker 1: their back. Pay for talcum power of the lab. You
Speaker 1: brought him on board. Everything's under control. Man, the hell
Speaker 1: is going on? Jason fourties, That's what's going on. He's
Speaker 1: an unstoppable killing machine. It's okay. He just wanted his back.
Speaker 1: How do we get off the ship? I don't know. Look,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be all right. What are you high? He's here.
Speaker 1: You have got to get them out of there. He slappy.
Speaker 1: I think we're finally okay. What the hell is that?
Speaker 1: You've got to be kidding me? Oh wow, it's been modified.
Speaker 1: You guys might want to run, all right, and before
Speaker 1: we keep moving on here, I'm just gonna go ahead.
Speaker 1: Mentioned If you want to watch Jason X, you can
Speaker 1: watch it most places. You can buy it or stream
Speaker 1: it digitally pretty much anywhere. You can pick it up
Speaker 1: as a physical Blu ray or a d v D.
Speaker 1: Though I don't think it's received any kind of really
Speaker 1: glowing um re release or anything. I don't to my knowledge,
Speaker 1: there haven't been any really crazy special editions of this film.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm wrong and and maybe in the future will
Speaker 1: get something like that. Well, there's a there's a really
Speaker 1: good UM full full series disc pack of Fred screen
Speaker 1: Factory or shout Factory, whatever you call it. UM. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, I don't know if it has a standalone
Speaker 1: release of that type. Okay, yeah, I kind of forgot
Speaker 1: about the elaborate Friday the thirteenth full series releases. Like,
Speaker 1: for example, the version of it I watched is the
Speaker 1: disc from that pack, and it begins with an optional
Speaker 1: introduction of Kane Hotter, the man who plays Jason. He
Speaker 1: says to the audience. Uh, he says, please enjoy the
Speaker 1: film as you watch it, or I will kill you. Well.
Speaker 1: Shall we get into the people involved in this film?
Speaker 1: All right? So at the top of the list here
Speaker 1: we have the director James Isaac. James Isaac lived as
Speaker 1: a special fects guy. Isaac's work goes all the way
Speaker 1: back to three Return of the Jedi, on which he
Speaker 1: was a creature effects technician. He followed that up with
Speaker 1: helping to make the Grimlins in four as part of
Speaker 1: the creature crew, and subsequent special effects credits include five
Speaker 1: Enemy Mine, nine seven's House to the Second Story nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Look who's talking to Virtuosity and David Cronenberg's Existence in
Speaker 1: nine Okay, here's the Cronenberg connection. We'll come back to
Speaker 1: that a couple of times as we moved down the
Speaker 1: cast list. But Virtuosity, isn't that the one that had oh,
Speaker 1: what's his name? It had Australian man Russell Crowe. Russell
Speaker 1: Crow strutting while staying alive plays on the soundtrack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like a three D printed, the blue blooded super
Speaker 1: clone of all the serial killers ever, and Denzo Washington
Speaker 1: has to hunt him or something. I think I watched
Speaker 1: it on TV many years ago. Well, um, Like, like
Speaker 1: you said, though, Isaac worked on Existence, but this wasn't
Speaker 1: the only time he worked with Cronenberg. He did creature
Speaker 1: effects on The Fly and eight six, and he was
Speaker 1: project supervisor on his film Naked Lunch. Other special effects
Speaker 1: credits include eighty nine Deep Star six, directed by Sean S. Cunningham,
Speaker 1: who was the original Friday the Thirteenth director and a
Speaker 1: producer on Jason X. That was one of those nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine underwater peril or horror movies that we've talked
Speaker 1: about on the show before. Uh. That is the one
Speaker 1: that I mainly recall for a scene where Miguel Ferrare
Speaker 1: uh jumps into an escape pod to get out of
Speaker 1: the deep sea base and then does rapid explosive decompression.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I watched this one on an airplane
Speaker 1: at one point, and I don't remember. I think I
Speaker 1: was kind of out of it when I watched it.
Speaker 1: But it has a big spacebug. And no it's not
Speaker 1: a space bug. It's it's a deep deep sea bug.
Speaker 1: But it has a big bug in it. They get attacked.
Speaker 1: Is it a killer clam? I think do they? It's
Speaker 1: a It's all kind of a dream to me. It
Speaker 1: is some sort of killer mollusk from the depths. Um oh,
Speaker 1: and Isaac also worked on es A Rachnophobia. I don't
Speaker 1: want to be unkind, but it's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: he did visual effects on all these movies with great
Speaker 1: visual effects um and apart from like one special effect
Speaker 1: that is very good and widely acknowledged as very good,
Speaker 1: I feel like the effects in Jason X are not great,
Speaker 1: and part of that maybe, I mean, there's obviously the
Speaker 1: digital problem, which Hubert was very vocal about there are
Speaker 1: a number of digital effects in here. In fact, I
Speaker 1: think this is the first time in the Friday the
Speaker 1: Thirteenth series where we have some digital blood effects, which
Speaker 1: I know m film fans and gore hounds alike tend
Speaker 1: to dislike in their films. I would not consider myself
Speaker 1: a gorehound, but I do not enjoy that nonetheless, m Um.
Speaker 1: Isaac though, how did he become a director? Well, it's
Speaker 1: a similar scenario that we've seen in other cases. There's
Speaker 1: a there was a film House three, the Horror Show
Speaker 1: said Lance Hendrickson and Brian James and it and the
Speaker 1: director's chair was vacated due to some reason or another,
Speaker 1: and so Isaac stepped up and directed the rest of
Speaker 1: the thing. And then he did Jason X. And he
Speaker 1: followed this up with just two films before his untimely death.
Speaker 1: He did two thousands sixes skin Walkers. I think I
Speaker 1: saw a part of this one, and then two thousand
Speaker 1: eights Pig Hunt, which is I believe a killer or
Speaker 1: mutant pig movie. M oh, alongside the likes of that
Speaker 1: Russell mulkahe movie that's basically like Australian Jaws meets Texas
Speaker 1: Chainsaw Massacre, but the Jaws part has a pig instead
Speaker 1: of a shark. Oh man, it's kind of it's still
Speaker 1: kind of alarming that we haven't done Russell Mkay film
Speaker 1: yet on Weird House. We will, all right, Let's get
Speaker 1: to the screenplay credit, also an acting credit, because this
Speaker 1: guy also plays the character Dallas in this. It's Todd
Speaker 1: farmer Born. This was his first screenwriting credit and his
Speaker 1: first acting role, and he's gone into act and write
Speaker 1: in a string of horror movies, including the two thousand
Speaker 1: nine remake of My Bloody Valentine. He was also one
Speaker 1: of the writers on the two thousand eleven Nick Cage
Speaker 1: film Drive Angry. I already mentioned uh some of the uh,
Speaker 1: the the other possibilities that came up, and these are
Speaker 1: for this film that Farmers mentioned in interviews. Another one
Speaker 1: that he mentions is Jason takes the Middle East was
Speaker 1: at least explored to some degree as a concept. I'm
Speaker 1: glad they did not go in that direction. I can't imagine.
Speaker 1: That sounds terrible, but also I guess it makes sense
Speaker 1: that around that time they were they were thinking of this.
Speaker 1: But yeah, thankfully they did not go in that direction.
Speaker 1: But two ideas that they mentioned were Jason blade Runner
Speaker 1: and Jason Alien, which obviously it seems like some of
Speaker 1: the ideas from those two buckets ended up in this picture. Yes,
Speaker 1: this film has both a replicant and a monster loose
Speaker 1: on the spaceship. So yeah, the monster, of course is
Speaker 1: Kane Holder. Like we said, who plays Jason Vorhees and
Speaker 1: credit is playing Jason Vorhees slash uber Jason. Um, this
Speaker 1: is cyber Jason that you know, we get. I mean
Speaker 1: he's in the trailer. You know what's going to happen. Uh,
Speaker 1: He's gonna be upgraded into some sort of half mechanical,
Speaker 1: cybernetic superman killer. But we we profiled Kane on the
Speaker 1: Jason Takes Manhattan episode. But yeah, basically born five stunt
Speaker 1: man turned stunt coordinator and actor, with the stunt acting
Speaker 1: credits going all the way back to the nineteen seventies. Um,
Speaker 1: he didn't start playing Jason until New Blood in but
Speaker 1: then subsequently appeared as him in three more Jason movies.
Speaker 1: But before new Blood, he'd appeared as an actor in
Speaker 1: such films as House to an Alligator, playing the alligator uncredited.
Speaker 1: And he's done stunt work in The Hills Have Eyes
Speaker 1: Part two. He also did a leather face stunt work
Speaker 1: in TCM three, and he played Freddie's gloved hand at
Speaker 1: the end of Jason Goes to Hell. So Jason is
Speaker 1: a non speaking role, but but Kane Hotter brings a
Speaker 1: lot of performative posture to the character, Like he really
Speaker 1: kind of signals Jason's inner life just in the way
Speaker 1: he sort of like heaves his chest as he breathes
Speaker 1: or turns his shoulders in his face. Oh yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: we we we talked about this is a good bit
Speaker 1: with Jason takes Manhattan, he has he has. It's it's
Speaker 1: easy to dismiss the man behind the mask and say,
Speaker 1: well that's not important, but it is a great physical performance. Agreed.
Speaker 1: Our main protagonist are I guess she's kind of our
Speaker 1: final girl that this movie kind of flips the script
Speaker 1: enough that you don't really have the final girl scenario
Speaker 1: going on here. But uh, the character that that that
Speaker 1: hangs out the longest alongside Jason in this film is
Speaker 1: the character Rowan played by Lexi Dilick. Yeah, she's kind
Speaker 1: of different than than the standard Friday thirteenth final girl.
Speaker 1: Um in that She's not like the the smart, well
Speaker 1: behaved youth among a bunch of party people. She instead
Speaker 1: is from literally a different century. Yeah. But in that
Speaker 1: I guess, because I guess one of the ideas and
Speaker 1: the other Jason films is the Good Girl. The Final
Speaker 1: Girl is also more traditional. She's not one of these
Speaker 1: new youth that are so problematic. And in this yes,
Speaker 1: she's very um traditional because she's from four hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: that's right. Uh. And she's some kind of scientists. She's
Speaker 1: like the director of the Crystal Lake Research Facility, whatever
Speaker 1: that is. We never find out what her research specialty
Speaker 1: is other than maybe cryogenics. Yeah, so she ends up
Speaker 1: essentially being our time traveling Final Girl. Lexidag a Canadian
Speaker 1: actor who started on on such TV shows as The
Speaker 1: Hidden Room and Tech War, but eventually went on to
Speaker 1: act on such shows as Earth Final Conflict, The Chris
Speaker 1: Isaac Show, and Dromedat hundred, Stargate SG One, Supernatural, Smallville,
Speaker 1: and Continuum. She played Talia al gool on TV's Arrow,
Speaker 1: and she has a major role on The Chucky TV show,
Speaker 1: which I have not watched, but my friend Dave Streepy
Speaker 1: tells me that it is great and uh yeah, she's
Speaker 1: she saw it in this and I think correct me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong, but she may be the first lead
Speaker 1: actor of Asian to send in a Friday the Thirteenth movie.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, but I agree she slid in this.
Speaker 1: I mean, no roles in this movie are really written
Speaker 1: with enough panache to like really give the actor is
Speaker 1: anything to grab onto, But she does great with what's there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if nothing else, it is the character that,
Speaker 1: at least for a while very much is the one
Speaker 1: warning everybody like you're doing what you still have Jason
Speaker 1: on the ship, etcetera. And so that energy propels her
Speaker 1: for a good, good bit of the run here. Yes,
Speaker 1: we also have a character by the name of Professor
Speaker 1: Lowe played by Jonathan Potts born ninety four. This is
Speaker 1: the sleazy professor that is lead this excursion to Old Earth.
Speaker 1: Will explain all this that uh that ends up resurrecting
Speaker 1: Jason forties for for greed. I don't know why he's
Speaker 1: a professor. He doesn't do anything professor really. I think
Speaker 1: it was just like, you know, an excuse to have
Speaker 1: a cast full of eighteen to twenty four year olds
Speaker 1: as they're often are in these you know, in the
Speaker 1: Friday Thirteenth movies, are like the students, and so I guess, well,
Speaker 1: there should be a professor, but he what's he a
Speaker 1: professor of? He just seems to be like a grave
Speaker 1: robber professor of earth studies. I believe Earth one study
Speaker 1: really is that it. He's an archaeologist but also sleeps back. Um. Now.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Potts himself again Canadian actor, has done a ton
Speaker 1: of TV, especially Canadian TV, over the years, including The
Speaker 1: Hitchhiker in eight nine. He was the voice of Link
Speaker 1: on the Legend of Zelda TV series. Okay, yeah, he
Speaker 1: was on Wait Forever, Hold on a second, there was
Speaker 1: a Legend of Zelda TV series. Yeah, apparently there was.
Speaker 1: I don't remember it, but he he did the voice.
Speaker 1: He was also a voice on a Super Mario series.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if these were Japanese productions that
Speaker 1: were then exported maybe to the North American market, and
Speaker 1: then they've just been brought in. I mean that's probably
Speaker 1: what it was, right, Super Mario Super Show. He may
Speaker 1: have done that one. I think he's credited on that one.
Speaker 1: But mainly he's the voice of of Link on the
Speaker 1: Legend of Zelda TV series Oki Doki. Yeah, but anyway,
Speaker 1: also such credits as Forever Night, the Canadian vampire series
Speaker 1: that maybe many of us probably remember. That one's big
Speaker 1: in my memory as like a thing I would watch
Speaker 1: on hotel cable when my family went on vacation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one I remember as being like one of those
Speaker 1: shows that's on at strange times to watch TV when
Speaker 1: there's nothing else on, and you just find yourself watching
Speaker 1: part of Forever Night, but but not being drawn into
Speaker 1: Forever Night. But also another show pretty much fits the same.
Speaker 1: Bill Kung through the legend continues. But he was in
Speaker 1: Due South, he was in Russell McKay's nine film Resurrection
Speaker 1: alongside Christopher Lambert. He was on Queer as Folk. He
Speaker 1: was in the two thousand ten film Devil, he was
Speaker 1: on the Strain. He was in Supernatural, Working Moms and
Speaker 1: The Coomy Rule. So I've not seen much of that,
Speaker 1: but I would like to see how this actor would
Speaker 1: be used in a Russell mukayy production. And this he
Speaker 1: plays a greedy, sleazy professor. And I don't know if
Speaker 1: there's all that much to say about the part. Like
Speaker 1: like I said about Basically, none of the characters are
Speaker 1: all that interestingly written a right, and it's it's not
Speaker 1: an interesting performance either, Like he's I think it's safe
Speaker 1: to say he's done better in plenty of other places. Now,
Speaker 1: one character that is a fun addition to the lineup
Speaker 1: here is the cyborg k M fourteen played by Lisa
Speaker 1: Rider born nineteen seventy. Okay, now here, they're kind of
Speaker 1: injecting something into the movie. This is something we never
Speaker 1: expected to see Jason versus a robot. It yeah, and
Speaker 1: and it's it's great that they went there. They didn't
Speaker 1: hold back there, Like we're putting Jason in the future
Speaker 1: on a spaceship, should we also have him, uh do
Speaker 1: battle with with an attractive female cyborg? And they said, yes,
Speaker 1: of course we should do that. Why why would we
Speaker 1: set this up if we're not going to give that
Speaker 1: to the viewer. Also, I detect like once she goes
Speaker 1: into Jason battle mode, her character seems strongly at least
Speaker 1: aesthetically matrix influenced with like the gun play in the
Speaker 1: kung Fu and the outfit. That's right, this movie's post
Speaker 1: matrix anyway. Lisa Rider is a Canadian actor still very
Speaker 1: active but she also played a computer woman on TVs
Speaker 1: Andromeda and other TV credits include Earth Final Conflict, Forever Night,
Speaker 1: and The Strain. I hope they're going to be a
Speaker 1: number of these titles that keep coming up. It's kind
Speaker 1: of the same scenario. I encountered a lot watching nineties
Speaker 1: episodes of the Outer Limits. Uh, you have this, this
Speaker 1: this talented pool of Canadian actors, but they appear in
Speaker 1: a lot of these different Canadian productions. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the thing that seems to be emerging as we look
Speaker 1: at all the people here. It's just Canada, Canada, Canada.
Speaker 1: It's it's very Yeah, it's a very Canadian film. Um.
Speaker 1: It reminds me a lot of Outer Limits in many
Speaker 1: respects because Outer Limits was a series that was filmed
Speaker 1: in Canada, featured mostly Canadian actors, had often really good
Speaker 1: practical effects, but often uh, really underperforming digital effects. And
Speaker 1: uh and I would say to digital effects on some episodes,
Speaker 1: maybe many episodes of of Outer Limits when they really
Speaker 1: went for it, were worse than anything we see in
Speaker 1: this film. Wow. But sometimes they also didn't lean as
Speaker 1: heavily on it and so forth. Okay, but so uh,
Speaker 1: this movie has not just a. I guess in switching
Speaker 1: it up, it doesn't have a final girl. It has
Speaker 1: more of a final boy. There's kind of a good
Speaker 1: boy who's like nice in contrast to all of the
Speaker 1: other young characters, right, would you say, yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 1: have Sunarin played by Chuck Campbell nine. He's he's a
Speaker 1: robot technician. He's also the robot's boyfriend. He is he's
Speaker 1: the boyfriend of of k M fourteen and um and
Speaker 1: and he's I guess he's also the nerd character, Like
Speaker 1: he's the good boy nerd of the film, but not
Speaker 1: the kind of doomed nerd. I mean, there's two different
Speaker 1: kinds of nerds who show up in a Friday the
Speaker 1: Thirteenth ensemble. There is the nerd who you see as
Speaker 1: clearly marked for death by Jason, and then there's the
Speaker 1: kind of sweet nerd who will make it to the
Speaker 1: end of credits. Yeah yeah, which I guess kind of
Speaker 1: It shows how the nerd character in cinema progresses over
Speaker 1: the years, where it's this this character of pure mockery,
Speaker 1: uh in pity becomes this character that is like I
Speaker 1: think from many fans, like we realize, oh, well that
Speaker 1: is us, and so that maybe this character should survive.
Speaker 1: We should focus on the survivability of this character as
Speaker 1: opposed to anything else. We got to flatter the audience,
Speaker 1: which is in this case a theater full of nerds. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: myself included. Though I did not get to see it
Speaker 1: on the big screen. I probably saw this on DVD,
Speaker 1: but at any right, campbell Um. His other TV credits
Speaker 1: include Stargate Atlantis, and he also had a small role
Speaker 1: as a customer I'm not sure which customer in John
Speaker 1: Carpenter's in the Mouth of Madness. Oh and then we
Speaker 1: have another fun member of the cast here. Peter Mensa
Speaker 1: plays Sergeant Broadski. This is our head space marine aboard
Speaker 1: the ships called the Grendel. If I'm the Grendel, Yes,
Speaker 1: the Grendel, lead space machine on the Grendel. Sergeant broad
Speaker 1: Sky here space marine, space marine. Yes, what I say
Speaker 1: space machine. No, but he is a machine because he
Speaker 1: is he is quite a physical specimen. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: think a charismatic, fun performance like It's I feel like
Speaker 1: it's impossible to not like Peter Mensa in this movie.
Speaker 1: I agree totally. Once again, there's not a lot to
Speaker 1: this character on the page, Like basically for all the characters,
Speaker 1: but Peter Mensa brings a lot to the role. He's
Speaker 1: He's just very charming um and delivers even lines that
Speaker 1: would be cringe e off the lips of another actor
Speaker 1: with with you know, a good sense of fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think he's a solid action movie acting presence and
Speaker 1: uh and it is very likable in the film. Um
Speaker 1: he's a Ghandhian English actor who gamers will probably recognize
Speaker 1: for his voice and likeness as Zach Hammond in two
Speaker 1: thousand eights dead Space, the original Dead Space video game.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's a part of the remake that
Speaker 1: they're putting out soon, but hey, he mince has been
Speaker 1: busy with other things because his TV credits include Earth
Speaker 1: Final Conflict, Highlander, The Raven that's the spinoff, um Star
Speaker 1: Trek Enterprise, Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Uh, the Spartacas
Speaker 1: TV show or TV shows is a big one. He
Speaker 1: had a recurring character on those UM those series. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's see, he was on True Blood, Sweepy Hollow, the
Speaker 1: Agents of Shield. Um. On the film front, he was
Speaker 1: in two thousands Bruiser, the George Romero film. Oh, and uh,
Speaker 1: a lot of people will remember him from two thousand
Speaker 1: six is three hundred, in which he played the Persian
Speaker 1: messenger who gets kicked down a well. This is of
Speaker 1: course the famous this is Spartat scene, bummer, how dare
Speaker 1: you kick Peter Mensa down in a well? As Sparta sucks?
Speaker 1: They maybe they felt bad about it, and that's why
Speaker 1: they brought him back for three hundred, Rise of an Empire,
Speaker 1: a movie that I watched like a minute of in
Speaker 1: an airplane once. Oh. But he was also in two
Speaker 1: thousand eighth, Incredible Hole, two thousand nines, avatar Um. He
Speaker 1: was in the Scorpion King Colon Book of Lost Souls
Speaker 1: from two thousand eighteen and Snake Eyes from one So
Speaker 1: he's been a very busy man over the years. He's
Speaker 1: got a great moment where the sleazy professor is trying
Speaker 1: to talk him into uh taking Jason alive, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, he keeps offering him increasing sums of my
Speaker 1: me and then at one point he seems to acquiesced, like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: give me five hundred thousand dollars and we'll take Jason alive.
Speaker 1: And then he walks away to his grunts and says
Speaker 1: to them Okay, professor wants me to take him alive,
Speaker 1: so you know, after you blast him to pieces, put
Speaker 1: one in his legs so it looks like we tried. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's just he's just a good character. He has a
Speaker 1: good moral fiber. And correct me if I'm wrong in this,
Speaker 1: because your knowledge of the Jason movies farser passes my own.
Speaker 1: But I feel like this character, uh, the sergeant here
Speaker 1: is unlike anything Jason's gone up against before, Like this
Speaker 1: is a strong, physically capable and trained guy that he
Speaker 1: has to combat. Yeah, basically, well, I mean, so do
Speaker 1: do I want to discuss the details of Jason Goes
Speaker 1: to Hell? So Jason Goes to Hell begins with Jason
Speaker 1: like getting blown up by a I don't know, military brigade,
Speaker 1: swat team or something. They like blow him to pieces,
Speaker 1: and then they take the pieces to uh coroner's office,
Speaker 1: I think, And then the corner like starts looking at
Speaker 1: his heart and then eats it and then becomes Jason.
Speaker 1: This is what I recall happening. So, I mean, he
Speaker 1: has faced real force before, but I think only in
Speaker 1: that instance. Um, so, no, he he has never like
Speaker 1: done battle with a with a tough guy like Peter
Speaker 1: Mensa and so so this is pretty much new all right, Um,
Speaker 1: there's another character in this Gecko. Is Gecko a space
Speaker 1: marine as well? I don't remember. Okay, See, she didn't
Speaker 1: stand out to me all that much in in previous
Speaker 1: viewings of the of the film, but she stood out
Speaker 1: this time because if you've spent any amount of time
Speaker 1: during the pandemic watching Canadian comedy series on Netflix like
Speaker 1: I have, then you will recognize Gecko, played by Amanda
Speaker 1: Bruegel as pastor Nina from Kim's Convenience and also as
Speaker 1: the character Sonia from Working Moms, another popular Canadian uh
Speaker 1: comedy that aired on Netflix here in the States. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen either of those shows. Yeah, yeah, she's a
Speaker 1: she's a talented comedic actor. She didn't really get to
Speaker 1: do that in this film. She's just another space marine
Speaker 1: killed by Jason in this. But yeah, she's been in
Speaker 1: a ton of things. She's recent She recently played Rita
Speaker 1: Blue on thirty five episodes of The Handmad's Tale. She
Speaker 1: was on The Snow Pierce for TV series, which I watched,
Speaker 1: but I you know, I don't remember her from that
Speaker 1: as much. Uh. She was on Orphan black and on
Speaker 1: the movie front, she was in Suicide Squad and she's
Speaker 1: going to be in Brandon Cronenberg's upcoming Infinity Pool among others.
Speaker 1: That's a movie title, not a not no, not yet,
Speaker 1: not just his infinity pool in his backyard. He yeah,
Speaker 1: he has it on that that website where you rent
Speaker 1: out your pools two people, and she's going to she's
Speaker 1: gonna rent it. It's it's exciting. Hey, but you just
Speaker 1: said the name Cronenberg and we've been talking about Canada NonStop.
Speaker 1: What what what? What? What's going on here? Oh? Well, yes,
Speaker 1: David Cronenberg himself shows up playing Dr Wimmer or Dr Wimmer.
Speaker 1: I can't remember how they pronounced, you know, if they
Speaker 1: say his character's name, I don't even recall it because
Speaker 1: it's just David Cronenberg on screen and the character I
Speaker 1: think is David Cronenberg. Yeah, this is David Cronenberg, the
Speaker 1: legendary Canadian director born three. We talked all about David
Speaker 1: Cronenberg the director last week on our Scanners episode, but
Speaker 1: this week we're talking about David Cronenberg the actor. And
Speaker 1: did he end up in this I'm not sure, but
Speaker 1: I mean it is Canadian and he just shows up
Speaker 1: at the beginning to say it's almost as if he
Speaker 1: got wind this film was being made near his house,
Speaker 1: and he was like, I would like to be skewered
Speaker 1: by Jason. I mean it. It does seem to be
Speaker 1: the Isaac connection here, the connection to the director. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's It's interesting to look at Cronenberg's acting
Speaker 1: credentials over the years, because, as is often the case
Speaker 1: with directors, you do find him cameoing in his own
Speaker 1: works as early as seventy five Shivers. He also did
Speaker 1: a cameo in John Landis five film Into the Night,
Speaker 1: but his first er role in another director's film was
Speaker 1: his fun turn is Dr Philip K. Decker and Clive
Speaker 1: Barker's dark fantasy horror film Night Breed. He's super creepy
Speaker 1: in that. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that really
Speaker 1: put him more on the radar for everyone else. They're like, oh,
Speaker 1: Cronenberg is like he can he can actually act. He
Speaker 1: has a nice screen presence and and uh, and I thought, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that film Night Breed is a very interesting
Speaker 1: one to sort of hee's apart and figure out it
Speaker 1: has a lot of I think a lot of strong
Speaker 1: things going for it that have been appreciated over the years.
Speaker 1: It's a It's Barker's um adaptation of his own novella Cabal.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Cronenberg has a great role in that is
Speaker 1: this uh this uh, this doctor that seems to be
Speaker 1: very much on the side of our troubled protagonist but
Speaker 1: then turns out to be a um a psychopath. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's uh incredibly unsettling in that movie. He does a
Speaker 1: kind of soft spoken performance that's I guess how Cronenberg
Speaker 1: actually talks in life as well, but it's it's effectively unsettling. Um.
Speaker 1: And oh hey, we we got another Cronenberg connection, right
Speaker 1: a character actor we talked about in last week's episode
Speaker 1: on Scanners. Oh yeah, Yeah, that's right. Robert A. Silverman
Speaker 1: um is in this one playing Dieter Perez uh Silverman
Speaker 1: born ninety three. Uh. Like we said last week, guess
Speaker 1: the Cronenberg regular another Canadian actor. He played the scanner
Speaker 1: artist and Scanners who makes the big head sculpture that
Speaker 1: he goes inside to talk to the main character in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he plays a great weirdo. This film is no exception,
Speaker 1: but his part is essentially a zoom call from bed
Speaker 1: he's he's he's almost literally phoning it in in a
Speaker 1: modern sense, though they clearly had to set this up
Speaker 1: to get the zoom experience in two thousand and one.
Speaker 1: And then, finally, the music in this film is by
Speaker 1: The score is by Harry Manfordini. Three. You know, when
Speaker 1: we watch Jason Takes Manhattan, I think we, or at
Speaker 1: least I d of bemoaned the fact that fred Moland
Speaker 1: did the music instead of Harry Manfredini, who scored the
Speaker 1: original Friday the Thirteenth score and also created that excellent
Speaker 1: uh Friday the Thirteenth Part three song that was a
Speaker 1: legit disco hito uh And we're like, oh, why couldn't
Speaker 1: man Fordini be on board for this one? Well, man
Speaker 1: from Deeedy did compose the score for Jason X, and
Speaker 1: from from from my cast, it ranges from forgettably mediocre
Speaker 1: and serviceable to just actively annoying. I think I can
Speaker 1: say it without feeling bad because he's had a lot
Speaker 1: of success in other ways and and done great stuff.
Speaker 1: The music in this movie is awful, just terrible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah again, that bit from the score for part three
Speaker 1: is amazing and this is not okay, You're ready to
Speaker 1: talk about the plot. Let's do it because it's a Friday.
Speaker 1: The third movie, same thing came up in Jason Takes Manhattan.
Speaker 1: We're not going to do every scene in this movie.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is formulaic slasher stuff, but we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the set up and then some
Speaker 1: broad themes and interesting things that stick out. So the
Speaker 1: opening credits play over what seems to be a vision
Speaker 1: of Dante's Inferno that they're suggesting some kind of demonic
Speaker 1: cavern deep in the earth. It's full of spires and mountains,
Speaker 1: gloomy clouds and castle ramparts, and everything is dark and
Speaker 1: dank and bursting with fire. And this is a particular
Speaker 1: kind of murky, ugly two thousand one c g I
Speaker 1: a look that I very much associate with horror movies
Speaker 1: and video games of the early to mid two thousands.
Speaker 1: Think of c g I environments where everything is kind
Speaker 1: of muddled and muddy and hard to see, and that
Speaker 1: the dominant colors are like brown and orange, and there
Speaker 1: are modeled texture mats over everything, modeled like m O
Speaker 1: T T L ed uh. And so I think of
Speaker 1: like Silent Hill or Resident Evil, for do you know,
Speaker 1: what I mean with these these animated textures. Yeah, definitely
Speaker 1: on the Silent Hill front night. I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time in the in the Silent Hill game, so
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about. And here I
Speaker 1: think it might be useful to refer back to Roger
Speaker 1: Ebert's review to see to what extent we agree or
Speaker 1: disagree with his comments. So Ebert writes about the effects
Speaker 1: in this movie. He says, quote. With Star Wars Episode two,
Speaker 1: Attack of the Clones opening in mid May, there's been
Speaker 1: a lot of talk lately about how good computer generated
Speaker 1: special effects have become. I was, I was like, what
Speaker 1: citation needed? But then I remember people used to talk
Speaker 1: about the Star Wars prequels this way. I mean, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to knock on the Star Wars prequels again.
Speaker 1: They have their detractors and their defenders, and and their
Speaker 1: their pluses and minuses to them. But I think one
Speaker 1: of the things I do not love about the Star
Speaker 1: Wars prequels is the kind of uh weightlessness of the
Speaker 1: c g I and frorements in them. Yeah. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: certainly plenty of things that that still hold up well
Speaker 1: on those films. But there are some some areas that
Speaker 1: could use a fresh code of digital paint if such
Speaker 1: a thing were possible. Yeah. But but Ebert goes on
Speaker 1: on the basis of the effects in Jason X and
Speaker 1: the much more entertaining Scorpion King. Okay, we can also
Speaker 1: chat about how bad they are getting referring to computer
Speaker 1: generated effects. Perhaps audiences do not require realistic illusions, but
Speaker 1: simply the illusion of realistic illusions. Shabby special effects can
Speaker 1: have their own charm. And you know what, that took
Speaker 1: an interesting turn. And I agree with that last sentence
Speaker 1: in multiple ways, because I often not only enjoy, but
Speaker 1: especially seek out a certain kind of artful non realistic
Speaker 1: practical effect. Non realistic practical effects as their own art form,
Speaker 1: and I think you can appreciate them the same way
Speaker 1: you would appreciate like the design of a theater set.
Speaker 1: So if you go to see a play with good sets,
Speaker 1: usually the set is not going to conform to strict realism.
Speaker 1: It's not like tricking you into thinking that that's a
Speaker 1: real tree. Instead, it will lightly suggest a location in
Speaker 1: an esthetically pleasing way. And non realistic special effects in
Speaker 1: movies can be pleasing even if you wouldn't mistake them
Speaker 1: for like real footage of whatever phenomenon they're attempting to suggest.
Speaker 1: The effects in Jason X have a totally different kind
Speaker 1: of charm. They're certainly not realistic looking exactly. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're those you know, two thousand one era c g
Speaker 1: I effects. Uh, there's there's one notable exception that looks
Speaker 1: pretty convincing. They are definitely not beautiful again, except for
Speaker 1: maybe one exception in a perverse way. Instead, they are pleasing,
Speaker 1: and I would say exactly the same way that it
Speaker 1: is pleasing to look at tasteless but elaborately dirt tattoos.
Speaker 1: Like imagine a guy with a full back Shrek tattoo.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what the effects in this movie are like.
Speaker 1: It's like, I'm not saying it's like beautiful, but it's
Speaker 1: also kind of not something I want to stop looking at.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because I definitely went into this film with
Speaker 1: that Ebert review and his critique of the special effects
Speaker 1: in the forefront of my mind, and so I was
Speaker 1: ready to hate on them. But for the most part,
Speaker 1: I did not have that experience with him. I think
Speaker 1: part of it, and I very much agree with with
Speaker 1: with with abridge. General take on effects here, I think
Speaker 1: the thing is that a lot of these special effects
Speaker 1: that we see and Jason next, the purely digital effects
Speaker 1: are of spaceships moving through space, and in that it's
Speaker 1: detached enough from human interaction that it can look a
Speaker 1: little uh raw, It can look a little rough by
Speaker 1: our modern standpoint, and it doesn't really um throw me
Speaker 1: out of the experience of watching the movie. Likewise, there's
Speaker 1: a scene where we see a couple of big alien
Speaker 1: looking monsters in this and then we realized pretty quickly
Speaker 1: that they are simulations on like a hollow deck environment,
Speaker 1: and therefore we're like, Okay, well, of course they don't
Speaker 1: look realistic. This is a simulation, and so that distance
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah, they look kind of like an ugly
Speaker 1: computer game. And in fact I didn't mind that scene
Speaker 1: at all. I kind of like that. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess by and large, it would be different if
Speaker 1: there was an actual digital thing, like if Jason were digital,
Speaker 1: that would be like it's it's hard to imagine just
Speaker 1: how ugly this movie would be if for some illogical
Speaker 1: reason they're like, we don't need Kane Hoder, We're going
Speaker 1: to simulate Jason virtually, Like, imagine all the things we
Speaker 1: can do now if he's a pure digital effect, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that that would be horrible. Well I feel like
Speaker 1: that even that, if done right, could succeed on the
Speaker 1: Shrek Tattoo level, but not not so much on the
Speaker 1: other levels. Yeah, I you know, you get into I
Speaker 1: guess the pure digital effects, you get into the weightlessness problem,
Speaker 1: like how is it interact with the environment? How are
Speaker 1: people interacting with that? And I mean that's a problem
Speaker 1: even in really well done digital effects movies or not,
Speaker 1: maybe not a problem, but it's it's, for instance, very
Speaker 1: noticeable if you go back and watch the Harry Potter films,
Speaker 1: like watch the films with Adobe, the Elf in Adobe
Speaker 1: being a digital effect, watch how other actors interact with
Speaker 1: that character, or or more particularly, watch how Gary Oldman
Speaker 1: acts opposite the house Elf versus everyone else, Like Oldman
Speaker 1: brings that character to life in a way, uh that
Speaker 1: no one else in the in the films, for the
Speaker 1: most part, is able to do. And it's due to
Speaker 1: just how talented Oldman was, talented in a way you
Speaker 1: cannot expect of just an average performer. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: see what you're saying. I mean, like Gary Oldman, I'm
Speaker 1: sure you could just put opposite a brick wall and
Speaker 1: have him imagine that that wall is giving a performance
Speaker 1: for him to react to. Right, But you give any actor,
Speaker 1: say a rubber snake to wrestle with, and they're probably
Speaker 1: gonna do something that you can get into, Like there's
Speaker 1: a certain physical reality there that even if they're only
Speaker 1: going you know, half energy on it, you can still appreciate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a bride of the monster. Bell will go see
Speaker 1: wrestling with the octopus arms. Yeah, and we know it's
Speaker 1: not a real octopus arm, but it's like it's being touched.
Speaker 1: It's physical. We can see it, and therefore the it's
Speaker 1: easier for us to buy. It's not that you look
Speaker 1: at it and say that looks real. It's that you
Speaker 1: look at it and say I like that. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: look at it, and you go on on another level,
Speaker 1: this is truth, what I'm seeing, what I am observing
Speaker 1: experiencing his truth. Okay, But anyway, so you start with
Speaker 1: this like sort of hideous c g I environment and
Speaker 1: you zoom out to reveal that this like fire blasting
Speaker 1: hell cavern is actually the inside of Jason's head. It
Speaker 1: was like the it was like the sort of the
Speaker 1: veins in or the arteries whatever those are in in
Speaker 1: Jason's eyeball. And uh So for the credit sequence, we
Speaker 1: see Jason is restrained in the laboratory and scientists are
Speaker 1: looming over him with hypodermic needles. They're doing jason Ology.
Speaker 1: And this is the beginning premise of the film that
Speaker 1: you know they're doing studies on him. I guess it's
Speaker 1: never established how he was captured. Yeah, yeah, they mentioned
Speaker 1: that they have tried multiple ways to kill him, and
Speaker 1: I didn't cross check the ways they mentioned with how
Speaker 1: they actually kill him in other films, so, as far
Speaker 1: as I know, those were all within a laboratory setting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that when she's talking, when the main character
Speaker 1: in this movie is talking about how he was captured
Speaker 1: and that they tried to destroy him, that's all off screen.
Speaker 1: That's not like what happened in the movies before. So
Speaker 1: there's a new scene, big dark room with Jason on
Speaker 1: a raised platform. He's like secured by locks, and um
Speaker 1: we see text on the screen and the terminator font
Speaker 1: saying Crystal Lake Research Facility subject to Jason Vorhees status
Speaker 1: awaiting cryogenic suspension, and Jason's just staring the floor expressionless.
Speaker 1: You can see his one of his eyes through the
Speaker 1: hockey mask. But then, oh, is that I'm going to
Speaker 1: drift up and look at somebody. There's a guard nearby.
Speaker 1: I don't know that. This opening is just really like
Speaker 1: out of nowhere and throws you straight into this absurd situation.
Speaker 1: And I like that. Yeah, this whole opening could be
Speaker 1: a short film of and and it would it would
Speaker 1: still be richly amusing. Um. I get a big kick
Speaker 1: out of a research facility being established at Crystal Lake
Speaker 1: to properly study the localized phenomenon that is Jason Vorhees.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if they established the Elm Street
Speaker 1: sweep Studies lab or the hadden Field Gunshot Survivability Workshop.
Speaker 1: You know, yes, yes, Uh, it's it's a good concept.
Speaker 1: So we see Jason there, like his his eye locks
Speaker 1: on the bumbling guard and then kind of squints like
Speaker 1: like he's like, I'm gonna get you. And the guard
Speaker 1: gets creeped out and throws a blanket over Jason. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then next thing, Oh, here comes von Kronenberg. I
Speaker 1: mean just here he is. Uh, he's walking down a corridor,
Speaker 1: a shiny corridor with a platoon of military dudes, and
Speaker 1: a lady pops into frame. This is Dr Rowan. Her
Speaker 1: last name, according to Wikipedia is La Fontane. They just
Speaker 1: call her Rowan in the movie, but Dr Rowan Lafontaine.
Speaker 1: This is Alexa Doeg And she she asks David Cronenberg, Hey,
Speaker 1: you know what are you doing. He says he's going
Speaker 1: to take the specimen. And she says, wait, you can't
Speaker 1: do that that the cryd stasis facility isn't ready yet.
Speaker 1: And David Cronenberg is like, well, we're not going to
Speaker 1: freeze him. I want him soft. I'm taking him to Scranton,
Speaker 1: which was a real laugh out loud moment for us.
Speaker 1: I think he says, to the Scranton facility. So what's
Speaker 1: at the Scranton facility. Well, they are going to study
Speaker 1: Jason Vorhees regeneration ability. Think of all the medical advances
Speaker 1: we could unlock if we turn regular sick people into
Speaker 1: Jason Vorhees is. Now there's a whole movie concept they
Speaker 1: just leave right there on the table. Now Rowan objects
Speaker 1: to this because this would involve I guess he's just
Speaker 1: taking Jason down the highway in a truck or something,
Speaker 1: and she says, I'm moving him over open country or
Speaker 1: she asks are you willing to risk the deaths of
Speaker 1: innocent civilians for your research? And David says yes, but he,
Speaker 1: you know, he assures her, he's like, look, don't worry
Speaker 1: about it. I've got a bunch of unnamed military grunts
Speaker 1: with me, so it's impossible for anything to go wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, don't worry about it. He's he's already not
Speaker 1: your problem anymore. Yeah, I'm surrounded by extras. How could
Speaker 1: you imagine something bad could happen? So anyway, David Cronenberg
Speaker 1: and all his buddies going to to get the meat,
Speaker 1: and they go into the big room and there's the
Speaker 1: figure covered in a blanket, just like Jason was when
Speaker 1: we saw him last. But oh reveal they pulled the
Speaker 1: blanket off and it's the guard, not Jason. Jason jumps
Speaker 1: up out of nowhere. He massacres all the military dudes.
Speaker 1: He throws a spear through David Cronenberg's stomach. Rowan observes
Speaker 1: this carnage, and then there's a chase, and she cleverly
Speaker 1: tricks Jason into the cryogenic freezing chamber, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: she just said was not ready yet, so I don't
Speaker 1: know when it got ready. Um, But she like tricks
Speaker 1: him in there, slams the door on him, and initiates
Speaker 1: the freezing sequence, so she won right movie over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I say, if they'd ended it right here, this
Speaker 1: would have been a pretty fun little Jason gets frozen
Speaker 1: short film. But nope, Jason uh takes his machete and
Speaker 1: stabs through the wall of the freezer and so he
Speaker 1: kind of pokes her with the machete and she's like
Speaker 1: and falls over injured. But then the I guess the
Speaker 1: cold air or the freezer gas starts gushing out of
Speaker 1: the chamber through the machete hole into the room, and
Speaker 1: then another door locks to contain the leak. So Jason
Speaker 1: gets frozen, and then Rowan gets frozen as well. They're
Speaker 1: both frozen, and then seemingly the whole Owl facility is
Speaker 1: just abandoned for the duration of life on Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nobody ever checks to see what happened in there, because
Speaker 1: we cut two hundreds of years later and we get
Speaker 1: a copy of the opening scene in Aliens Deep Salvage
Speaker 1: Team prize into the facility to check it out, except
Speaker 1: it's not a deep salvage team. It's a professor and
Speaker 1: a group of college students and a robot or cyborg
Speaker 1: named KM, and so they come in looking around at everything,
Speaker 1: and they're consulting the robot. KM has information on everything,
Speaker 1: so they're like, what's this. You know, they're consulting her
Speaker 1: about the make and model of the cryogenic freezer in
Speaker 1: the room, and I noticed continuity error because she says
Speaker 1: that this uh freezer was manufactured in the year but
Speaker 1: later in the movie they say that the movie is
Speaker 1: taking place, it's in the year and she says that
Speaker 1: is four hundred and fifty five years after she was frozen,
Speaker 1: so they say that the freezer was manufactured ten years
Speaker 1: after she was frozen. Okay, well, yeah, that's that's wrong.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm disappointed that Jason X didn't do it. It's
Speaker 1: an ath that right here. Let's open up the freezer.
Speaker 1: They do, and it's Jason in a raised machete pose.
Speaker 1: I guess he froze like that. They say humanoid but
Speaker 1: organic composition unclear, and then they're like, what's that on
Speaker 1: his face? And this will begin a trend of future
Speaker 1: jokes in the movie. There's a lot of just jokes
Speaker 1: about like, oh, the future is very far from now,
Speaker 1: so they say, well, this is facial armor used in
Speaker 1: a sport that was outlawed in so as of this year,
Speaker 1: we've only got like another year or two left of
Speaker 1: hockey all right, strapped in for that. But there are
Speaker 1: a lot of jokes like this in the movie. It's
Speaker 1: like at one point, um uh, Alexa Doeg says, uh,
Speaker 1: you never forget this. It's just like riding a bike,
Speaker 1: and one of the characters says, what's a bike? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they it's a fun it's a fun trope to to
Speaker 1: use in your cryogenic time travel film. So anyway, they
Speaker 1: discover Jason, and they discover Roman, both of them, and
Speaker 1: they realized that she can be thought out. Um oh,
Speaker 1: and also one of the student guys gets his arm
Speaker 1: chopped off when ice Jason tips over and falls on
Speaker 1: him machete first, which is a pretty hilarious moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a great moment. And uh, I like how they
Speaker 1: they're establish they've already alluded to this with the whole
Speaker 1: you can't carry Jason cross country, the idea that that
Speaker 1: Jason is so dangerous that he's still extremely dangerous and
Speaker 1: potentially lethal even while he's completely inert, like he can
Speaker 1: just fall over and kill people, right. And fortunately for
Speaker 1: the the guy, this is the twenty five century, so
Speaker 1: like his arms off now. But there's nano medicine on
Speaker 1: board the ship that can easily repair a severed arm. Uh,
Speaker 1: the nanobox will heal all and they do. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: just pour a little gray goo on there and it'll
Speaker 1: do its work. So they bring Rowan and Jason, both
Speaker 1: frozen on board the spaceship and they blast off. Oh
Speaker 1: and by the way, on the on the way out,
Speaker 1: we see that the Earth in this timeline is now
Speaker 1: a horrible waste land and humans are now based on
Speaker 1: a planet called Earth. To Earth kind of looks similar
Speaker 1: to the inside of Jason's head. It's like in the
Speaker 1: hundreds of years since then, Earth became Jason's soul. It's
Speaker 1: you know, stormy brown and orange c g I desert.
Speaker 1: Oh and also Earth orbit is just thick with space junk.
Speaker 1: It kind of mirrors what you were talking about with
Speaker 1: the Friday the Thirteenth franchise, though, like everything has just
Speaker 1: been just been written to death. We just completely drained
Speaker 1: it of all its resources and and and enjoyment and life,
Speaker 1: and this is what we're left with. We've got to
Speaker 1: have a new beginning on Earth too, and Jason X
Speaker 1: is kind of that Earth too for the franchise. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I can see that. Uh So, anyway, there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of cliche ridden chatter from the various characters who we
Speaker 1: meet as the as the students and the frozen people
Speaker 1: come back on the ship. And you've got the three
Speaker 1: sort of buckets of characters, Like it's not just the students.
Speaker 1: You have the Space College students, who are you know,
Speaker 1: your standard Friday thirteenth type characters. But then you also
Speaker 1: have Space Truckers and Space Marines. Yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: the Space Truckers they kind of they're like the Space
Speaker 1: and Guild of this of this this world, this universe.
Speaker 1: They control movement between the worlds. They've got a monopoly
Speaker 1: on it. Uh You've got the Space Marines, they've got
Speaker 1: to protect these the Earth to interest when you go
Speaker 1: to the lawless world of Earth one. And then yeah,
Speaker 1: the Space College students that it's the college that's paying
Speaker 1: for this whole thing. This is a journey of exploration.
Speaker 1: This Jason Retrieval was done with grant money. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: part of again, part of the Earth one Studies program. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: all of these buckets of characters, again, they behave pretty
Speaker 1: much exactly as horror conventions dictate. I'm not gonna pretend
Speaker 1: there's a lot of originality here. It's sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: it's be horror movies by the books, except it's in
Speaker 1: a kind of funny way, smashing several very different be
Speaker 1: horror genres into one movie. So you've got kind of
Speaker 1: an alien clone with the Space Truckers, You've got an
Speaker 1: Aliens clone with the Space Marines, and then you've just
Speaker 1: got straight up Friday thirteen. Yeah. And there are a
Speaker 1: lot of characters in this, and I I I do.
Speaker 1: We didn't have time to really mention them all, and
Speaker 1: for some of them, Jason X is probably their most
Speaker 1: notable picture. But again, a lot of Canadian actors and
Speaker 1: I think most most of the most of them did
Speaker 1: pretty good with what they had to work with in
Speaker 1: Jason X. Yeah, so we're almost done with the set
Speaker 1: up here, but we've got Jason. They bring him and
Speaker 1: he's lying on an operating table throwing out in the
Speaker 1: ship's laboratory just drip and slime for the floor while
Speaker 1: while Rowan is revived from cryosleep by the nanobots, which
Speaker 1: they the ants, and she wakes up, she's instantly lucid.
Speaker 1: They tell her it's the five and she says, uh,
Speaker 1: that's over four hundred years in the future. Well, she's
Speaker 1: she's in shock, She's in shock. Yeah. There is a
Speaker 1: scene where the greedy, scheming Professor gets on a video
Speaker 1: call with Robert Silverman, the guy from Scanners. Uh and uh,
Speaker 1: Silverman's I think he's playing like like a fence or
Speaker 1: something like a guy who will market a stolen artifacts
Speaker 1: for the Professor that he loots from twenty one century Earth.
Speaker 1: And so the Professor is like, I've got a gold mine,
Speaker 1: and Silverman says, a box of DVDs is not a
Speaker 1: gold mine. I can't move them, suggesting that he's been
Speaker 1: repeatedly showing up with DVDs recovered from from the dead Earth. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I don't know exactly how to interpret this line.
Speaker 1: Is it like, oh, is this, you know, like old
Speaker 1: media that people want to watch, or is it more
Speaker 1: like this would be a valuable artifact the way we
Speaker 1: would regard like medieval manu script today. Mm hmmm, oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Are they watching their cinemas or or is it just
Speaker 1: the the physical artifact like kind of like a Jerry
Speaker 1: or something, you know, the cinemas. Yes, I was thinking
Speaker 1: of overdrawn at the memory bank. Is it like DVDs
Speaker 1: are illegal in the future and people seek them out
Speaker 1: from older Yeah, and it's so like is it kind
Speaker 1: of like a Jerry McGuire situation, where like the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the CDs are just one or two different pictures.
Speaker 1: It's whatever was mass produced off of a particular blockbuster.
Speaker 1: I want these movies from two thousand one. Get me
Speaker 1: a copy of Domestic Disturbance starring John Travolta. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: guess The joke here, though, is that DVDs were still
Speaker 1: really hot and in two thousand and one and didn't
Speaker 1: start declining until years later. I guess mhm. But anyway,
Speaker 1: the professor is like, Nope, not DVDs. I've got a
Speaker 1: couple of frozen people from more than four hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: and Silverman is unimpressed. Apparently, this future timeline is just
Speaker 1: flood with people who have been reanimated from hundreds of
Speaker 1: years earlier Rowan now is going to be the oldest
Speaker 1: ever revived. But that's just not interesting to Silverman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how's he gonna make any money after that? But then
Speaker 1: he looks at the file. He's like, wait a second,
Speaker 1: this other one you recovered, that's Jason Vorhees. He killed
Speaker 1: nearly two hundred people and simply disappeared without a trace.
Speaker 1: He could be worth a fortune to the right buyer. Why,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but the greedy professor he wants money,
Speaker 1: so he's he's going to get the money by selling
Speaker 1: Jason's like this, this slimy hockey mask guy to somebody
Speaker 1: even that that presents possibilities that could have been their
Speaker 1: own movie, like a collector of of strange and grotesque
Speaker 1: things from the Old Earth. They want to, you know,
Speaker 1: to put put Jason Vorhees on display, uh in their
Speaker 1: in their mansion and their Earth to mansion, Like that
Speaker 1: would be a whole movie right there. Or you could
Speaker 1: go back on that whole regeneration lab thing, like oh yeah,
Speaker 1: people on Earth two they want to live forever. They've
Speaker 1: been working on it. They've got those nanobots. But nothing
Speaker 1: beats good old fashioned supernatural immortality. That's true, and we
Speaker 1: could learn how to harness that supernatural immortality for ourselves.
Speaker 1: We could make Jason nanobots. What if Jason became a
Speaker 1: swarm of nanobots? That would be there? You go, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm glad they did not go in that direction purely
Speaker 1: for the effects, because that is exactly the the the
Speaker 1: full digital Jason that we did not want to see.
Speaker 1: That would be the scorpion King Jason that that the
Speaker 1: effects department here was not ready for and the viewers
Speaker 1: were not ready for either. Okay, here, I think we're
Speaker 1: just gonna uh skip more lightly over some of the
Speaker 1: other things that happened in the film. One thing we
Speaker 1: got to discuss is a particular gory special effect. Because
Speaker 1: while the effects and Jason X are not generally considered
Speaker 1: a highlight of the series, not generally considered all that great,
Speaker 1: there is one notable exception. The first space youth that
Speaker 1: Jason kills after waking up. Uh. This is a scene
Speaker 1: that even Roger Ebert seems impressed by. And this is
Speaker 1: the the frozen face scene. Yeah, this is a quality kill,
Speaker 1: to be sure, and I think we we probably referenced
Speaker 1: this one in our stuff to boll your Mind episode
Speaker 1: on freezing and shattering organic materials. But basically what happens here,
Speaker 1: it's like when Jason first wakes up, he grabs a
Speaker 1: lady and he like shoves her face into liquid nitrogen
Speaker 1: and then smashes her head like an ice cube. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gross and effective, but also not too bloody by
Speaker 1: virtue of all the blood being frozen. Right. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's cuboid instead of instead of liquidity. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a new territory for Jason trying new things. Right after that,
Speaker 1: there is what I thought is actually a genuinely quite
Speaker 1: funny moment where Jason goes to the tray next to
Speaker 1: the operating table in this lab where he's throwing out
Speaker 1: and you see, I guess he's looking at you think
Speaker 1: he's looking at like scalpels or whatever, and then he
Speaker 1: picks up a surgical chetty. Okay, um. Next thing the
Speaker 1: level of self awareness of this movie, So Jason X
Speaker 1: is not a fully self aware of parody like you know,
Speaker 1: the Scream movies or Cabin in the Woods or something
Speaker 1: where the characters would openly talk about the tropes and
Speaker 1: acknowledge them and sort of critique them. But It is
Speaker 1: the first movie in the Friday Thirteenth series that has
Speaker 1: partial elements of this kind, and this did come out
Speaker 1: after Scream went mainstream. With these observations about horror movies,
Speaker 1: for example, the sort of implied punitive morality of many
Speaker 1: slasher movies, where characters seem to be punished for uh,
Speaker 1: for trivial sins like premarital sex or drug use. And
Speaker 1: this this is openly discussed by characters in Scream, But
Speaker 1: then in Jason X we see this knowledge kind of
Speaker 1: incorporated as a knowing parody. Like you see Jason become
Speaker 1: their their cuts where he's like in Ray, aged and
Speaker 1: powered up for violence. When characters break one of these
Speaker 1: slasher rules of conduct, when they like drink or engage
Speaker 1: in brutally cringe e sex scenes awful. But here this
Speaker 1: reaction of Jason's has not done implicitly as it is
Speaker 1: in earlier movies, but explicitly I think for intentional comedy.
Speaker 1: I think here they are poking fun at the previous
Speaker 1: movies in this series. Yeah, yeah, I think so. There's
Speaker 1: a certain amount of self awareness to the picture. And
Speaker 1: then then they also go for sort of broader comedy
Speaker 1: other places in the picture plenty of times with mixed results.
Speaker 1: Like there's a nice moment where Mins's characters, the sergeant
Speaker 1: Um initially seems to be killed by Jason. Jason stabs
Speaker 1: him through it like stabs him I think from behind,
Speaker 1: like drew a wall through his chest. And Sergeant Brodsky
Speaker 1: here says it's going to take more than a poke
Speaker 1: in the ribs to put down this old dog. And
Speaker 1: then Jason stabs him through the chest again and he goes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that ought to do it. That seemingly dies. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was good though. Actually he comes back after that. But
Speaker 1: but that line was good enough that I actually thought
Speaker 1: that was probably a Peter Mensa improv. Yeah, it might
Speaker 1: have been. There's also a scene on the other end
Speaker 1: of the spectrum. There's this scene uh that we can
Speaker 1: refer to tastefully as k M fourteen wants Nipples to Um,
Speaker 1: where she's talking with her boyfriend the techy about how
Speaker 1: she wishes to have nipples like other uh female members
Speaker 1: of the crew. And it seems like it's it's not
Speaker 1: an actually funny scene. The comedy falls flat, and it
Speaker 1: seems at first like it's going to be super cringe
Speaker 1: e In establishing the relationship between the Thimbott and the technician.
Speaker 1: But then it actually lands in this sort of like
Speaker 1: sweeter area where it's it's made clear that their relationship
Speaker 1: is not exploitive. It's not like a purely physical relationship,
Speaker 1: but it is um it's it's very consensual and very
Speaker 1: genuine in these this robot and this nerd love each other.
Speaker 1: It seems like true love. Yeah, Okay, one more thing
Speaker 1: this movie does get into is virtual reality. I think
Speaker 1: this is one area where the movie actually stumbled across
Speaker 1: a really good idea, one that had the potential to
Speaker 1: be much more interesting and funny than it was, though
Speaker 1: it's used for some good moments Jason interacting with essentially
Speaker 1: the hollow Deck from Star Trek. What happens when you
Speaker 1: put an unstoppable undead monster into a virtual environment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they they bust this out, and it's kind of thought provoking,
Speaker 1: like how long could they have contained Jason Vordhees with
Speaker 1: more preparation. They end up throwing it together as a
Speaker 1: as as like a stalling tactic. Uh so they can
Speaker 1: try and escape. But but what if they had actually
Speaker 1: prepared for Like what if this had been the plan
Speaker 1: upon thawing and out. And then also, what are the
Speaker 1: ethics of creating a never ending kill sim to contain
Speaker 1: an undying killer? Well, I mean, if he actually doesn't
Speaker 1: hurt anybody, I would say the ethics are good compared
Speaker 1: to him getting loose and hurting people. Right, So, well,
Speaker 1: it depends, I guess, on the NPCs. And that's sim right,
Speaker 1: getting into territory of disgust on stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind before, are like, oh, we like or the holograms conscious? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Or they on what level? Are they feeling pain? I
Speaker 1: don't know. But then again, if it's preventing Jason from
Speaker 1: killing hundreds of people in the real world, then I
Speaker 1: don't know. I guess I didn't take it as implying
Speaker 1: that the holograms were conscious, but that would be its
Speaker 1: own kind of horror movie. I guess. Oh, we have
Speaker 1: created a like a literal digitally created hell. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a This is often called the Jason X problem in philosophy.
Speaker 1: I imagine some of you out there have studied it,
Speaker 1: But I do think, I mean like that you could
Speaker 1: have made a whole like interesting horror movie out of
Speaker 1: an idea like this, like monster versus illusion. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it really almost kind of creates a you could have.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a Jurassic Park scenario because obviously
Speaker 1: that's where you'd have to go in such a film,
Speaker 1: is that something would break the illusion. The illusion would
Speaker 1: break down in the monster, would the Jason or whatever
Speaker 1: you have in there would bust loose and you'd have
Speaker 1: to somehow subdue them again. I mean, it does kind
Speaker 1: of deal with the nature of Jason that gets discussed,
Speaker 1: which is that like, you can't destroy Jason. He always
Speaker 1: comes back, but you can like freeze him for a
Speaker 1: period of time, like you can do things to sort
Speaker 1: of prevent him from acting, but you can never destroy him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. You can move him closer to a massive
Speaker 1: black hole. That that would be I guess the thing
Speaker 1: to do. Yeah, one last thing before we finish up
Speaker 1: Uber Jason. I mean they're in the trailer. It's the
Speaker 1: advertised Jason is of course going to get swarmed by
Speaker 1: nanobots after he's been uh taken out a commission by
Speaker 1: k M. The robots. She does some like gunfo on
Speaker 1: him and then blows him up sort of, and then
Speaker 1: the nano bots in the medical bay, aren't they sweet?
Speaker 1: Aren't they helpful? They just restore him and make him
Speaker 1: better than ever, and even I guess like doubly invulnerable.
Speaker 1: He's more invulnerable than he's ever been before. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: I guess the way to read this is the nano
Speaker 1: bots are trying to do what they normally do, repair damaged,
Speaker 1: injured human being. But this is not a human being.
Speaker 1: His physiology is weird, his flesh is weird. He's like
Speaker 1: an undead thing, and they don't really seem to know
Speaker 1: how to handle this, so they end up building Uber Jason.
Speaker 1: Like even his hockey mask is like weirdly incorporated into
Speaker 1: his his head in a way that that I think
Speaker 1: really works. But it's like computer air here processing error. Uh,
Speaker 1: we think we've healed him, and this is the results.
Speaker 1: This is one of these like AI alignment problems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all you did was programmed me to help people, So
Speaker 1: I helped Jason. So yeah, the basic structure of the film, yeah,
Speaker 1: ends up being Jason thaws out, rampages, is killed, nanobots
Speaker 1: restore him to Uber Jason form, and then battles everyone again.
Speaker 1: And finally we get down to the survivors, uh, making
Speaker 1: a break for it, And we also get this great
Speaker 1: scene where Jason is flying through space at the essentially
Speaker 1: the escape hot but then here comes Mensa, here comes
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brodsky, and essentially like supplexes Jason Vorhees through the
Speaker 1: atmosphere of Earth two, and they seemingly burn up as
Speaker 1: they fall through the atmosphere to this new world. And
Speaker 1: then they appear as a shooting star going through the
Speaker 1: night sky and we see like some camp counselors on
Speaker 1: Earth to being like, oh wow, it's beautiful, let's go
Speaker 1: over check it out. Yeah, so we're left with this
Speaker 1: weird and I think it totally works. It's a nice
Speaker 1: moment at the end where it's like Earth two was
Speaker 1: a new start. It was we put behind all of
Speaker 1: our our awfulness from Earth one. But what have we done.
Speaker 1: We've gone out and we've brought Jason Vorhees to Earth,
Speaker 1: to a planet that is clearly not ready for him,
Speaker 1: and thus concludes the tale of Jason X. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we and and like you said, we this film was
Speaker 1: not successful enough in in any way for there to
Speaker 1: be a proper follow up to Jason X, not that
Speaker 1: we needed one. Jason X delivers on all its promise.
Speaker 1: It does everything it's set out to do seemingly um
Speaker 1: but Ebert even in his review, he's like, people are
Speaker 1: probably gonna love it, and we're probably gonna get Jason
Speaker 1: X two, but we didn't get that this is all
Speaker 1: we have. Yeah, he was even lamenting while imagining that
Speaker 1: audiences would eat this up that uh, it would not
Speaker 1: be called Jason eleven, it would be called Jason X
Speaker 1: two or Adjason X Part two. I think he said, Oh, man,
Speaker 1: I signed me up. I would have seen it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the counterintuitive ordering of like the
Speaker 1: Rambo movies, doesn't it go like First Blood, first Blood
Speaker 1: Part two, Rambo, then Rambo three, then Rambo. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like they could have done X part two
Speaker 1: and it might have been good, But I don't know
Speaker 1: if they could do it now. Like, like the alchemy
Speaker 1: of something like this has to be just right. You
Speaker 1: have to have just the right balance, and and they
Speaker 1: managed to deliver on that for the most part with
Speaker 1: Jason X. If you make Jason X Part two and
Speaker 1: you go too serious or you go too silly with it,
Speaker 1: and it would just all fall apart. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is an artifact, much like a case of DVDs
Speaker 1: discovered by by grave robbers from the year two thousand one.
Speaker 1: It is an artifact of a previous time that we
Speaker 1: should study and understand. All right, well, help us to
Speaker 1: study and understand this artifact. If you out there have
Speaker 1: thoughts on Jason X in its place in the Friday
Speaker 1: the Thirteenth film franchise, if you have memories of seeing
Speaker 1: it for the first time on DVD, on VHS or
Speaker 1: in the theater itself. I always love a good uh
Speaker 1: theater viewing account right in let us know we would
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. Just a reminder that we're
Speaker 1: primarily a science podcast. Here it stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: But every Friday and the Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: podcast feed, we set aside most serious concerns and we
Speaker 1: just talk about a weird film like Jason X. And
Speaker 1: I mentioned letter Boxed earlier. If you go to letterbox
Speaker 1: dot com is L E T T E R B
Speaker 1: O x D dot com you can look us up
Speaker 1: weird how This is our user name, and we have
Speaker 1: an ongoing list there of all the films all one
Speaker 1: hundred now that we have featured on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks to our audio producer J. J. Pauseway. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, to share something interesting, or just
Speaker 1: to say hello, you can email us at contact at
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.