What the HELL happened to Friday The 13th Part 10 JASON X!!!
Jason X
Jesus wept.
So this was, something. Something special. For someone. The studio shit the bed with the fans when making Jason Goes to Hell, Freddy vs Jason was going through one script after another, after another and remained in production hell.
The studio didn’t want to lose their precious Jason IP since they bought it specifically to bring Freddy and Jason together, with the potential for two huge monolithic franchises eternally pumping out money. So the result of waiting for Freddy and Jason? This.
Send Jason to SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
This film can’t really be discussed without cross over discussions on the eventual release of Freddy vs Jason. I mean it honestly both insane? And extreme dedication in the belief that those two sharing the screen would be the biggest even ever, that this studio believed so hard in it they waited 8 years before forcing this shit onto the world. Just to keep Jason in the workhouse for them to pair up with Freddy. They went through dozens of scripts and top writers to make this happen. 8 fucking years of waiting. Trying and failing. Waiting, and trying again. Why the long wait? Why does it matter? Because it directly ties into the failure that was Jason X.
There was a long drought in both Freddy and Jason because they were holding out for the hero script to bring the two together, and when Sean Cunningham wanted to force a Jason film out onto the world so Jason wouldn’t be forgotten( a plot point used for Freddy with wanting to be feared again as people forgot about him)The studio told Sean. Okay. Don’t take Jason away from us, you can have your stand alone Jason film.
With some caveats.
This is the reason Freddy stopped and Jason stopped dead in their franchises.
The studio was so dead set on these two fighting that all stand alone films were stopped. Why? Because continuity. If you are going to pit these two against each other. There has to be a believable film continuity that keeps them on page with each other. If Jason decided to get involved with the bloods and crips in Los Angeles, Freddy would have to locate the nearest Elm Street. If Freddy got killed off by some wise ass teens again, and sealed in a vault in hell. Well Jason would have to find a way to free him. They didn’t want one franchise or the other fucking up their plans.
How two immortal beings could cancel each other out when both have gone through the ringer of resurrection ranging from electricity to flaming dog piss. I just. Well I’m not paid millions of dollars so. Anyway.
Yes, Sean was allowed his lone Jason film. He just was told very politely. Do not fuck this up so he can’t fight Freddy. Don’t burn down Camp Crystal Lake, don’t turn him into mist. Don’t make this a mess we can’t clean up. Do these things, and you can have Jason fuck a raccoon if you want.
And so Sean did. He found a relatively attractive raccoon, dolled it up, and fucked it right into the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism.
SPACE!
Actually no. That isn’t true. It is what we ended up with ultimately. But dear readers. Oh. I have such sights to show you. Such horrors to share.
Believe it or not? Space was the last thing on the writers minds.
What follows is entirely true, and not in any way a bit I am putting together.
You had three adults team up for this project to toss out ideas that followed the rule of not interfering with the possibility of Freddy vs Jason. These three men. Sean S Cunningham, Todd Farmer and Jim Isaac came up with the following ideas. All of these ideas took place during a gathering of minds in ’99 mind you.
Jason Takes The Middle East
Jason Takes Los Angeles
Jason vs Nascar
Jason vs Antarctica
Blizzard of Jason-Crystal lake turned into a frozen wasteland
We could have had. Jason. Getting on a plane. Killing people on a plane. Flying to the middle east. Rambo fought the middle east. Jason could have gone there. But Nascar? How would that even….Would he possess a car and kill drivers? Does he get his license and start killing drivers during a blood rally race?
If you hear a scraping clawing sound? That’s the bottom of the barrel being scraped. They actually managed to reach it with their ideas.
Unfortunately only one idea survived this meeting and became the backdrop for their eventual 10th film. The idea these three thought sounded ‘cool’ was the concept of Jason in the future. A blade runner like future where some kids discover in a museum, a warehouse. Somewhere. Jason cryogenically frozen. The kids intrigued by this would accidentally set him free and Jason begins murdering teens in the future city.
That had legs. I mean in concept it sounds pretty good. Pluss it wouldn’t interfere with Freddy. It took place far enough in the future it didn’t ruin the continuity. It didn’t involve crystal lake or Elm street. So the project was greenlit.
So this is where it gets weird. Because trust me this one is weird considering the history of the others before it. 7 through 9 had much smaller budgets, 9 the lowest budget of them all. But Jason X was given a much. Much larger one, by far the biggest yet. The film was given 10 million dollars. Not a lot for a film but a lot more than it was given in the past, and far well more than it deserved.
So what happened? How could a film with a decent budget for once, and three minds fail both commercially and with fans?
Picture a can getting kicked further and further down the road. Now picture that can has three filmmakers inside it, and each kick is more being cut away from their idea and budget.
The original version of this film, was absolutely something. It wasn’t just a comedic idea of Jason being unfrozen in the future city of a new earth. It was going to be an action horror film. Much like what they wanted in part 8. This is going to sound crazy but in a good way. They didn’t want just a future city of people dressed in funky clothes. They wanted something along the line of Ridley Scott. Not just the look and style of Blade Runner, but the military and fire power of ALIENS. This was going to be a big holy shit Jason. We would have humans, aliens, space battles. Laser guns. Gritty cities in the future, flying cars. Jason vs aliens and serious action over gore and tits.
Kick the can.
There was no way this budget would give life to that vision. So they were told tone it down, no aliens, no high tech weaponry. No future cities and flying cars.
Okay, so the setting changed. No gritty city, no aliens, and no space marines. Next route? If you can’t make ALIENS, make ALIEN. Yes the next route was to follow a sort of Alien type setting where we’d follow Space Truckers. Again not joking. Space truckers going around doing deep salvage, end up coming across a cryogenically frozen Jason. Having no idea what or who he is, picking him up, bringing him aboard and slowly everyone is killed off, one by one. Ship lands on a cool planet and-
Kick the can.
No planet. This isn’t Star Wars. No planet, no ships(plural) keep it simple and remember horny teens, drugs, tits.
So space truckers got changed out for students on a field trip. The planet got changed to an earth facility.
Hold on to your butts, for this.
Jason is discovered as is another earth woman. She is Rowen the lead person in charge of the Crystal Lake Research Facility. After discovering Jason cannot be killed, they decide its safest for all of earth to have him frozen. She unfortunately ends up frozen with him as he tried escaping and attacking. She gets unfrozen along side Jason and begins immediately warning the kids about him and the events soon to play out. Jason would attack the teens killing them one by one. He would face off against an android and eventually be killed. Only to be resurrected and transformed by nano tech. Turned into an ultimate terminator like killing machine. The final act of the film? Gets even crazier. The kids realizing even 500 years in the future that Jason STILL remains unkillable, decide they have to find a way to contain him, to get rid of him. Make him someone elses problem. How do they do this? The only way space movies can. When you are faced with ultimate destruction, what do you do? You do what Star Trek taught us. Time travel.
They would send Jason through a time rift.
To the 1940’s. Setting up a potential sequel, in the same vein of Freddy vs Jason. We would end, with Jason finding his next victim. His mother.
They were going to send, uber cyborg terminator Jason, into the 40’s, and fight his mother.
Kick
The
Fucking
Can
Jason was not going to be in a movie, that would not only have him fight his mother in a sequel. But a movie that also pitched the idea of trapping him in VR distracting him with a program that would depict his mother drowning, only to drown her himself instead of save her. It was too fucking much. Even Cunningham said slow the fuck down and back off my dick.
On top of this, you had these two writing a movie that would still cost millions more than the budget they were given. But you also had just pure insanity. Going into space was a joke enough on its own. As was turning Jason into a steel masked terminator. But throwing in time travel? That’s just too much. Everyone thought so and our remaining two out of three minds were sat down in the cuck chair and told the reality of their situation.
Stop dreaming big, and make a direct to video film. This isn’t your Blade Runner, this is your Galaxy of Terror.
So most of that plot was kept in tact for the final film. Minus time travel, minus Jason killing his virtual mother, and more on budget.
Which brings us to the final story of the film. We got there finally.
As stated, Jason is captured, studied and killed multiple times by the camp crystal lake research facility. He’s killed over 200 people and being studied. He is scheduled for freezing only to begin killing people and attacking Rowen. Both frozen and left to be discovered by horny bored students 500 years later. Rowen is patched up, saved and resurrected. People are warned about Jason but they assure her he is still dead and frozen.
Jason is brought back to life because two horny teens are having premarital sex. As the girl reaches orgasm. Jason’s eyes open and he is ready for vengeance. Everyone is killed off slowly but surely. Jason still ends up in a virtual simulation as a distraction. But its an 80’s camp, with two hot big tittied camp counselors who smoke pot and love premarital sex. Jason still fights an android and gets turned into Uber Jason. Instead of getting shot out into a time rift though, Jason is shot out of the ship and dragged to earth in a fireball entering the atmosphere by a grunt in a space suit. Sending him to earth ending with two teens in the future, looking at a ‘flaming’ star, declaring lets go investigate it. And the film ends. Promising Jason killing future horny teens in the future woods.
I don’t need to ask what the hell happened with this movie. It was written on the subway walls. This was never going to be a success. Could it have been fun? Yes. It absolutely could have. In better hands.
Over ambitious, visionary writers and directors aimed far too high, and were struck down back to reality. The more they fought and failed, trying to get more into the film. The more ground they lost. More realistically though, reality killed their project.
It’s a sad fact a lot of filmmakers eventually face and I’ve witnessed both in behind the scenes documentaries and in real life. Going to the Art Institute for photography, we worked hand in hand with the film department and students. When they got to film their projects they all had similar experiences and expectations. They were going to make their THX1138. They would shoot an epic scene. High drama, acting, action. I was a zombie in a film called Carnival of the Damned. I had a shot death scene. The director envisioned this film he made as intense as Day of the Dead and as dark if not darker. It would be intense but fun. The makeup was dark circles under the eyes, white face paint, and tissue paper latex scars with blood in regular untouched street clothes. Night of the Living Dead had better results. This movie was shit and remains my sisters best dodged bullet as her ex purposely misspelled her name thinking it’d dig at her that she wouldn’t be credited in a film she helped on a lot. She thanked them for making it possible to remove her from that piece of shit.
You set out wanting to make ALIENS and you instead end up making something below Roger Corman that you would watch and normally mock.
On top of that you had the reality that this film was never meant to be a success. It was never meant to be anything. It’s kind of fucked up but again. No one wanted this but Cunningham. He got tired waiting for Jason vs Freddy and felt Jason needed to be remembered. So they let him do it, knowing it was a nothing burger. You let people dream up ideas for an interesting film. You let them put heart into the pitch and script. Then reminded them it didn’t matter because no one cared. Not even the studio.
If you ever saw the original ROCKY movie, there’s a scene where Stallone goes into the arena and looks over the place as they ready for the fight. The spectacle. A real boxing world champion giving a nobody a chance in the ring. He tells one of the workers the color on his trunks in their banner is wrong. The guy looks at it then back at Rocky and smirks asking him, does it really matter? He was being reminded. He wasn’t ever expected to do anything but show up. He wasn’t going to win, he wasn’t in a fight. It was a spectacle meant to make the other guy look good leading into his next big fight.
The only difference here is that Rocky showed the little guy could do it. He held his own and almost won. He proved he could do it.
This film failed. The bigger budget did nothing. Their was nothing for the MPAA to kill here. The film was cut down for run time and the only real grizzly death in the movie with blood was cut down. The movie was finished and….shelved for a year. This is also something that still happens in Hollywood. Most recently we can look at James Gunn when he joined DC during a merger. He was put on the back burner until the merger went through then let out. So as not to create waves given he was in the middle of online media cancelling him over his past tweets and edgy comments during his time with TROMA films.
New Lines president of production was fired. New Line was merging with Time Warner and to ensure this went smoothly. His greenlit projects were all canned. New Line had released a series of flops, one after the other. So when you are trying to look good during a merger with another big company. Well. You don’t want to leave the table and take a massive shit, only to have that smell travel through the room. Jason X was a from the start failure. They knew it. So they shelved it until the merger so it wouldn’t add to the pile of already mounted films that cost the studio. The film was shown in theaters, believe it or not. Just not in a large release. The film didn’t matter to the studio. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t get a theatrical release. It was going to get shown and advertised. But that’s where the other problems came.
The film was released over seas first. It did not perform well. By the time it came out in the United States. People either had the film spoiled online, word of mouth went around that it was horrible and not funny in a good way, and they did not care.
The most had a large budget and for the first time in ages. The film lost money. Even if the film had shared the same budget as part 8? It would have still been a critical failure. The film opened to 6 million, on a 10-13 million dollar budget. Once the smoke had cleared and the film had its run? It roughly dragged itself to around 15-16 million.
One year after its release? Freddy would finally square off against Jason. New Line got their baby made, it was a success and fans loved it. It was the best thing you could ask for as fans of either franchise.
But Jason X was the final nail in Jasons coffin. They finally, well and truly found a way to kill him for good. After Jason X There would be no more Jason films. To this day there still isn’t and hasn’t been.
They pitched ideas. Horrible ideas. The worst I remember hearing and I still pray never gets resurrected was the idea of doing Friday the 13th as a found footage film. Essentially turning Jason into the Blair Witch in the woods. But it thankfully never happened. Instead we have a prequel series coming to streaming. There is still talks of a reboot. But no one has since touched this film. 2002 was the official recorded date of death for Jason Voorhees. Honestly he died for a lot of us when Tommy Jarvis chained and killed him in Crystal Lake. Everything after that has been parading his corpse and a thing masquerading as Jason. Dragged out for three more go nowhere do nothing sequels that just further buried the series.
The only thing we got. Many moons later. Was the reboot. I debated covering that in this. I planned on it actually. Because I have many issues with this reboot. It helped me coin my still to this day favorite name for Jason. Farmer Jason’s pot farm. Because that is a thing that exist thanks to this reboot. But in all honesty? I can’t do it. Not because I’m physically dying after writing all this. But in reality? That film, Hell the reboots of the other franchises? Deserve their own articles. They need time to stew in their own rancid juices. Pluss I don’t want to kill any of you by having you commit to what will turn this into a 50 page article. We’re already at the point you either committed to the bit. Or checked out. I won’t drag you along any further. For now. That will come later once we get to Hellraiser. Because that my dear. That. Is going to cost me all the points, all my sanity.
As for Jason? Well.
Jason Voorhees was born off the idea of a filmmaker wanting to ape off the success of Halloween. If you could make a horror movie about a Holiday, why not make one off of the unlucky day? He just didn’t think it would become what it did. Nor did Kevin Bacon.
It gave us one of our first female killers in horror, It gave birth to Jason in the follow up sequel. Which lead to an iconic villain in the third. Jason even after his end. Still keeps popping up. People love laughing at and watching the movies. They marathon them. Hell I bought the big ass deluxe box set from SHOUT factory(Scream factory? Either or. Both) It’s an amazing set and I love these movies. Many years ago they released each one of these individually with unrated versions. They didn’t have much changes from the originals, but the extras were worth it.
The reality that we haven’t had Jason, in any form for 17 years is, crazy. I wont include the prequel series. Because to my knowledge, that is going to follow Pamela. But honestly the way things are now you never know. I grew up off these films. I rented them at our video store in town. Called Blockbuster daily waiting for them to tell me someone turned in their copies so I could watch The New Blood since I didn’t get to see it in theaters. I keep buying each new edition released and whenever they put these out in 4k? I’ll pick them up again. Same as I have with HALLOWEEN and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
These films still have watchability and remain entertaining. My proof of this isn’t just my take. My now ex, she hadn’t watched a lot of movies, especially horror. She actually avoided a lot of it. But she decided to give a few a chance with me. So I introduced her to the Friday films. I curated films to show that I thought they might enjoy more based off their likes and dislikes. A good boyfriend listens, and I do. So I showed these to her and even with the nudity, and lame jokes. They still enjoyed them. In fact. They liked that the films had a continuity. They liked that the women weren’t all brainless. They were likeable. The films got silly once we got to part 6. But it wasn’t self deprecating. It was having fun with itself and gave you what you wanted while also concluding a really interesting arch.
The films kept fans happy and willing to accept Jason coming back each and every time. We all laughed and accepted that each Friday would absolutely not be THE FINAL CHAPTER and THE FINAL FRIDAY was absolutely not going to be that. And Jason going to Hell was just a vacation and a premise for a new adventure.
Actually that last bit is kind of true. At one point they did joke about the idea of Gilbert Gottfried going to hell and bringing Jason back.
Would it have been better than Jason going to the middle east? Maybe.
If I had to give a cause of death, a real reason for what the hell happened to Jason?
With everything we’ve discussed, all we learned? I have to lay it on the feet of the studios.
Yes the MPAA and religious watchdog groups played their role, they were given and still hold power they should not. But this was during a time where things weren’t as accepted and ‘normal’ as they are now. These films are relatively tame compared to things we see and get in theater now. The more you dive into films shot between 86-98. You really notice the shift in tone across all of horror, and knowing the reason, the story why? It really paints a macabre picture of what films went through and the power these people had and should never had been allowed.
But the studios gave them this power. Not figuratively either. Now more than ever the MPA(formerly MPAA) is made up of the studios. During the late 80’s it was more, anonymous parents payrolled by studios. They gave them the power and they couldn’t slow down the machine. When violence in film became the reason for violence in reality. Studios had to answer for it. Which they did in hyper overreacting actions. From the butchering of the scripts. Reshoots and heavy edits done by the studio before the MPAA would sink their claws into it. It all adds up. If we really want to dig into it we could go as far as bringing NATO into this. The National Association of Theatre Owners, and their strict rule of not showing anything rated below an R.
Studios created their own fascinating, corporate paradox with creating the sleeping beast that was the MPA. They created it to protect themselves. Offering a grading system that they came up with was a way to tell people trust us, this is good for your family. This is good for your kids, These are for you the parents. You were promising entertainment at a level they could trust and it made steady cash flow. But it grew out of their control to a point it strangled filmmakers creativity.
At the heart of all of it. They killed Jason. The script rewrites, the reshoots and editing were all contributing factors. But the studio ultimately was to blame. Even later on when New Line decided to double down on their vision of a money printing machine between Jason and Freddy. They sacrificed a 10th film to push for their dream film. A dream film that was going to potentially open the doors for other cross overs. For more Freddy and Jason. Only we didn’t get that. And people had to turn to the comics for that.
Accepting a film pissing off the fans and being received as an all around bad film. But pointing to the box office earnings and saying “You know even failure can be success”, isn’t going to stop your franchise from digging its own grave. It just means you see the ground your about to bury yourself in. But you recognize there is still milk in that dead cows tits. So squeeze out what you can and bury the Heffer. You could try to save it. Knock it up and raise the baby healthy and better. Make the mama cow proud. But who needs to do that when you can milk it dead and toss it once your done.
And again. After 10 films. A reboot, and now a streaming series. Jason is still going to eventually return. Another reboot will and likely is coming. For better or worse. We can hope for better but getting it at this point. Well.
If Leatherface can return and kill a bus of influencers. Jason might kill a camp of woke counselors. I’ll still hold hope for the middle east.