So the idea here is, take Friday the 13th and mash it up with Alien, but also give it the budget and aesthetic of a turn-of-the-century Sci-Fi Channel (as it was then styled) production. This should be terrible. It does not entirely escape being terrible. And yet… somehow, this is in a lot of ways my favorite Jason yet.

Because yes, the characters are a pile of walking cliches; yes, the setting is so generic it could literally be in canon for any of eight different franchises; yes, the science in it makes no sense at all. But it has two big strengths:

  1. Alien is actually not that far off from a Friday the 13th structurally, as it’s all about jasons slowly stalking and picking off everyone one by one. And the movie really makes the sense of foreboding work by having one character who’s from jasontimes and knows what’s what, while everyone else is wildly over-confident about their ability to kill a jason with futuristic space weapons. So for most of the running length, it’s a well-executed science-fictional jason movie, played straight for the horror.

  2. But then at the end, they recognize that everything that is now happening is implausible af, and they just lean the fuck into it. The holodeck scene is highkey the funniest moment of any Jason movie, period, full stop, the end. And then the final scene, in all its absurd glory, is absolutely perfect.

Is this a good movie? I mean, not conventionally speaking, no. But if you’ve been watching the Weird Jasons, this one is delivering what the others were trying (and almost entirely failing) to give you. It’s not going to really satisfy someone who wanted a “regular” jason movie, and it’s of zero interest to someone who isn’t watching a whole bunch of jasons; but if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, it’s an extremely well done exemplar of the genre. Recommended, but to a very narrow audience.