Jason X is the tenth and final proper entry in the Friday the 13th series. Jason would go on to later fight Freddy Kruger and get a reboot, but Jason X is ostensibly the end of the beloved slasher. It’s odd Jason X ends with a cliffhanger as so many previous entries feigned finality, but it’s par for the course for this unhinged film and franchise.

The Friday the 13th franchise had run far off course by the time the tenth entry came around. Jason had entered New York, soul-hopped between police officers, and left its original studio. After New Line took over it was clear they didn’t know what to do with the series and had no intention of putting the killer back in the woods. After the finality of Jason Goes to Hell nine years prior, the studio decided to bring Jason back again and throw him into the far reaches of space.

Jason Preparing for his Date with Freddy

A Freddy Kruger vs Jason Vorhees film was teased nine years earlier with the ending of Jason Goes to Hell. in 2024 this would have been a post-credits sequence but in 1993 it’s just the final shot of the film. It took years, countless starts and stops, and in the interim New Line greenlit this bizarre futuristic take on the masked killer. Jason X was released one year before Freddy vs Jason and ended up being the highest-budget film in the entire series.

The one thing Jason X was able to pull off was keeping the character of Jason relevant before the Freddy vs Jason film. In 2002, the year Jason X was released, it had been nine years since we’d seen the character on screen. Jason X was planned in the midst of development hell for Freddy vs Jason but its release timing proved to be a smart strategy for New Line.

Jason Enters the Final Frontier

What was not a great strategy for New Line was this absolutely bonkers script. Jason X begins in the near future, 2010 to be exact. Serial Killer Jason Vorhees has been caught, tried, and sentenced to death for his crimes against countless horny teens. The only problem, Jason survives every execution attempt the government plans for him. The decision is then made for him to be cryogenically frozen until a suitable method for offing the masked killer is found. Flash forward 400 years in the future and a group of horny teen students discovers Jason’s body on a field trip to the original Earth.

There is additional world-building revealed throughout the film but it’s all irrelevant to the actual plot. Jason is in the future aboard a spaceship slowly killing off teens one by one. The characters in Jason X are even more forgettable than most entries in the series and the general conflict is laughable even by Friday the 13th standards. The film also cost upwards of 11 million dollars to make. The highest budget for any film in the series. Maybe the film looked great in 2002 but rewatching today it looks like a low-budget Sci-Fi Channel movie.

Thin Plot, Thinner Characters

The Friday the 13th series wisely abandoned any sense of seriousness and began leaning hard into camp. The effectiveness of these results varied with some being great fun flicks and others being borderline unwatchable. Jason X falls flatly in the second category.

The biggest sin Jason X commits is not being a fun movie to watch. Sure there are ridiculous and fun moments. The frozen head smash kill is a highlight of the series. But there is such a stench of immaturity to the film that it oftentimes feels like the script was written by a fourteen-year-old Edgleord in DC sneakers. There’s a sexy android lady who desperately wants human nipples, a sketchy teacher who loves getting his nipples cranked by students, and loads of students leaving their studies to go have sex. It’s bizarre and not in a way that helps the film.

Jason X Legacy

For all the juvenile antics there are a few memorable moments that work for the Friday the 13th series. Toward the end of the film, Jason is put in a simulation to keep him busy with a couple of pre-marital sex-loving teens he gets to kill. It’s a funny and self-referential joke that only works in a series as long-running as Friday the 13th. These moments though are too few and far between. Even with the new setting, most of the film is just standard Jason behavior. He finds a person and kills them in a gruesome way. It’s been done nine times before and better at least 8 times.

The true highlight of the film where the movie actually takes advantage of its premise is the introduction of Uber Jason. Some proper noun futuristic healing agent merges with Jason turning him into an undead cyborg killing machine. It’s an unhinged moment, a smart use of the film’s budget, and only utilized for the last five minutes of the film’s runtime.

Jason X is a sad ending for our killer and the franchise as a whole. After going into space four hundred years in the future, it would be very difficult to bring Jason back for a proper in-canon sequel. That’s a shame but the biggest shame is that this film takes a high concept with nowhere to go afterwards and wastes it. Had Jason X been a fun film filled with memorable moments, the series may have continued. Instead, Jason X is an uneven final canon entry that fails to deliver the campy horror fun the series is known for.