Forget that the last film in the long-running FRIDAY THE 13TH series was called JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY (1993): This formulaic stalk-and-slash picture sets Jason Voorhees loose aboard a 25th-century space ship filled with nubile archeology students in skimpy clothes. In a brief 21st-century prologue, the unkillable Jason (Kane Hodder) is scheduled to be cryogenically frozen after all attempts to execute him fail. Cutie-pie Rowan (Alexa Doig) is supposed to be overseeing his suspension, but scheming Dr. Wimmer (David Cronenberg) intervenes and insists on transporting Jason to another facility for further experimentation. Within minutes of Wimmer's pompous assurance that his military escort will make sure Jason is kept under lock and key, he and the heavily armed soldiers are all dead. Rowan tricks Jason into entering a cryogenic chamber, but both of them wind up frozen solid. Cut to the year 2455: Earth is a noxious dead planet and a team of student archeologists, led by the smug, greedy Dr. Lowe (Jonathan Potts), find the two frozen bodies and take them back to their ship. They revive Rowan, but assume her hulking companion is too far deteriorated to revive. How wrong they are: Jason is soon up and killing, first dispatching the ship's small retinue of professional soldiers in a series of scenes that suggest a dramatically scaled-down ALIENS, then turning his attention to the screaming students in their silly, belly-baring getups. Despite the futuristic setting, which relies so heavily on GGI effects that it looks like a feature-length production concept painting, this film is painfully predictable: People walk down dark corridors, Jason chops them up. Perhaps by way of suggesting that they know their mythic monsters and sci-fi classics, the filmmakers named the students' ship Grendel, the space station they're headed for is called Solaris and the rescue ship the Tiamat, after a Babylonian chaos god. The film's only bright spots are a scene in which the ship's austere android, Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder), is transformed into a butt-kicking robo-babe in a PVC jumpsuit, and another in which Jason is momentarily trapped on the ship's holo-deck, programmed to evoke Camp Crystal Lake, circa 1980, complete with a pair of pot-smoking sluts clad in, respectively, a pair of hot pants and a string bikini. This isn't wit in the Noel Coward sense of the word, but it's more clever than anything else this tired rehash has to offer. --Maitland McDonagh
