It’s another Friday the 13th week folks! It’s time to celebrate a series of films that defined horror for a generation of weirdos such as myself. These films had it all, bad acting, bloody and ridiculous murders, boobs and most importantly other boobs. We will be celebrating all of these movies today as a show of respect to their contribution to the horror genre. These films were tailor made for the 1980’s slasher films and were all made with the purely artistic intention of making all the money while spending none to make them.
New Line and Crystal Lake Entertainment did not wow the Friday audience with their first attempt at a Friday the 13th movie. Their combined forces fell into the trap of doing a gimmicky movie in order to keep the series moving until they could figure out a decent script for the movie they REALLY wanted to make, Freddy vs Jason. Unfortunately for them that particular movie would sit in developmental Hell for a while longer so they needed to make yet another Friday movie in order to keep audiences interested in the product. What could they do to keep audiences interested? Go back to the camp? Have Jason fight gang members in Los Angeles? Jason attacks Eskimos in the snow? No, they went where every franchise goes when they run out of ideas…space.
Release Date: April 26, 2002
Budget: 14 Million
Box Office: 17 Million
Back story and Plot: The year is 2008 and we have been having a pretty hard time finding out how to kill Jason Voorhees and make him stay dead. At the Crystal Lake Research Facility they had been running experiments for years and were out of options. The lead researcher Rowan decided the best scenario for everyone involved would be to freeze Jason until we could figure out a way to keep him dead.
Sadly for Rowan our government interferes and wants to do more experiments on Jason’s regeneration abilities. They feel that there is money to be made, and if governments love anything, it’s money. That particular plan was foiled when our old friend Jason (played for the last time by the talented Kane Hodder) gets free and starts murdering random people in the facility. Rowan was able to lure him into the cryogenic pod and activates it, unfortunately he stabs through the damn thing and freezes both of them.
Jump forward a couple of years til the year 2455. At this point Earth was a wasteland and we had moved to the creatively titled Earth 2 to survive. Earth was now just a place to take college kids on field trips and the trip we happen to see has the discovery of both Jason and Rowan frozen like ice cubes. Luckily for us this far into the future medical science has evolved to the point that being that old and mostly dead isn’t that big of a deal. So they unfreeze both Rowan and Jason and everything is going fine until some moron kids decide to have sex within 100 yards of our friendly hockey mask wearing villain.
Jason goes on a rampage throughout the ship and generally scaring the shit out of everyone from the college kids to the random space Marines these movies always have. Sadly for Jason the sex bot on board (Tsunaron was totally having sex with her) got leveled up into a mega bad ass android and shot Jason to bits. The end. OK, the issue with that was he landed (helpfully) onto a table that regenerated him and turned him into Uber Jason. Making and unstoppable killing machine into an upgraded futuristic unstoppable killing machine. So in retrospect it wasn’t the best plan. A now upgraded murder machine starts to do what he does best on a spaceship (at least it wasn’t a boat) that clearly was not designed for this type of madness, so their only hope was getting off that ship.
Survivor Girl: Rowan LaFontine (also Tsunaron and the head of Kay-Em 14)
Rowan was kind of a bad ass from the start. She was also the only person in both 2008 and 2455 that had any idea of what and who the hell they were dealing with. If this was in a cabin by a lake she totally could have killed Jason with a machete. She was a definite throwback to tougher chicks from the first films. Plus she had the benefit of not being a complete moron.
How’d she survive?
They were able to make it to the emergency shuttle to take off for Earth 2. Unfortunately Jason was able to follow them because he doesn’t give a shit about space rules. Just as he was about to land on the shuttle to continue his little murderous temper tantrum one of the space Marines ( Brodski, the leader and the one who had distracted Jason long enough for them to make it as far as they had) landed on Jason’s back and steered them both into Earth 2’s atmosphere and burning them up. (Except at the very end you see some kids about to do some fun stuff near Crystal Lake Mach 2 when they see something falling from the sky and landing in the lake…)
BEST CHARACTER IN THIS MOVIE? Kay-Em 14
I was tempted to make it Brodski because of his selflessness and fighting ability. The problem with that is he wasn’t an awesome, ninja, gun toting android lady in tight black leather. I don’t care who you are, that is a very tough combination for you to beat. Plus her head got knocked off and she still survived so she was clearly the cooler character.
An Idiot’s Opinion: This movie is ridiculous, it had terrible CGI, the acting was questionable at best plus the idea of Jason on a spaceship is maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That being said, I love this damn movie. It knows exactly what it is, the jokes are funny and it takes everything that makes Jason JASON and turns it up to 11. Kane Hodder went out on a high note with this version and I’m sure some will disagree but this is in my top 3 Fridays. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a bad joke, and this time the gimmicky movie worked.
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