Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) goes to space in the 10th Friday the 13th movie, which they should have called Jason and the Astronauts.  

Sending your characters into space is a cinematic punchline, shorthand for running out of ideas à la Moonraker or Hellraiser: Bloodline. But this is Friday the 13th, a franchise that jumped the shark circa 1985, so why not send Jason into space? If anything they should have done it sooner, since it jettisons the tedious repetition of stalking the same summer camp year after year, and explains why the characters all act like robots.

The year is 2455, Jason has been cryogenically frozen by David Cronenberg (really), and hockey has been outlawed for some reason (also really). Voorhees is decrystalised onboard a spaceship that’s basically a stratospheric summer camp populated by horny students, essentially Camp Decrystalisation Lake, emphasis on the camp. What follows is a sexy space romp version of Alien, led by a poor man’s Burke from Aliens, jeopardising the lives of his students in the hope of cashing in on the frozen celebrity psycho-killer.

This 2002 techno-slasher comprises the same body count carnage as the previous 2 decades but given a welcome change of scene and some self-referential comedy, along with plenty of entertaining kills, including someone getting impaled on a giant corkscrew that’s only on deck so someone can say “he’s screwed.”

The filmmakers seem intent on making the flick as unlikeable and inconsistent as possible, wearing its stupidity as proudly as Jason’s hockey mask. The 25th-century characters talk and dress like it’s the 1990s, referencing DVDs but claiming to have never heard of bikes, and saying things like “this sucks on so many levels” as though acknowledging it makes it ok rather than more obnoxious.

Released around the same time as Resident Evil, at least Jason X has the excuse of trying to be lame and succeeds as a moderately entertaining piece of space junk, even if the glossy, overlit production gives it about as much atmosphere as space itself.