Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) goes to space in this tenth Friday the 13th flick from 2001, which they should have called Jason and the Astronauts.  

Sending your characters into space has become a cinematic punchline, shorthand for running out of ideas à la Moonraker, Leprechaun 4: In Space or the Star Wars prequels. But considering the Friday the 13th franchise jumped the shark circa 1985, if anything it’s surprising they didn’t send Jason into space sooner.

The year is 2455, Jason has been cryogenically frozen by David Cronenberg (really), and hockey has been outlawed for some reason (also really). A spaceship crew visiting Earth discover Jason’s frozen body and decrystallise him onboard the ship, sending the defrosted killer on a space-age rampage.

It’s a fun idea on paper, providing a change of scene from the usual summer camp slaughter, plus it could explain for once why the characters all act like robots. But aside from some horribly cheap space CGI, Jason X is no different from its predecessors. The film never bothers explaining who the characters are, but they appear to be some sort of Star Trek-style research crew. Yet they act like horny slasher movie teenagers, and dress like half-naked ’90s rejects, constantly having sex and referencing things like DVDs, while saying they have never heard of bikes.

These plot black-holes would be forgivable if the film had any fun or atmosphere. But the obnoxious characters, lame jokes and lazy kills make it unwatchable, especially compared to the giddy space horror of 1997’s Event Horizon. When the best your movie has to offer is a guy being impaled on a giant corkscrew just so someone can say, “He’s screwed”, you know it is time to throw in the ammonium-based wet wipe. And aside from 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason and a 2009 reboot, Jason X did something that no other terrible Friday the 13th flick could: it finally killed Jason.