Unstoppable Killers

Happy long weekend, everyone! Something’s coming to get you! Maybe it’ll be an unknown microbe that turns all the blood in your body to dust, or maybe it’ll be a reanimated maniac determined to wear all the blood in your body. Who can tell. In any case, a trio of new 4K discs from Arrow Video is ready to celebrate the inevitability of death. Is that weird?

Let’s start with the most serious of the trio: The Andromeda Strain, Robert Wise’s 1971 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s best-seller about a quartet of civilian scientists racing to identify and contain an alien contaminant that’s wiped out the entire population of a small New Mexico town, except for an elderly alcoholic and a squalling baby.

Crichton’s book is a nail-biting procedural that races alongside his heroes as they run test after test and model after model, their methodology and professionalism wavering in the face of an ever-evolving microorganism. Wise’s adaptation, scripted by The Haunting’s Nelson Gidding, leans heavily on the sterility and measured tones of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, immersing the audience in the beautifully designed levels of Project Wildfire, a combination military hospital and biohazard lab where the action takes place.

Thanks to Gil Meleé’s twitchy electronic score and cinematographer Richard H. Kline’s clever visual aesthetic – which has to set a record for split-diopter widescreen compositions – the film is subtly unsettling from start to finish, using stillness and silence to make us even more apprehensive.

I was a little worried about revisiting the film, now more than half a century old and decidedly stately in its restraint, but The Andromeda Strain plays just fine; if anything, its sense of propriety and decorum being of no help at all in the face of an unreasoning menace feels downright timely.

The performances are a little one-note, but that’s because Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson and Kate Reid aren’t playing characters as much as exposition devices; their personalities become irrelevant the moment they don their paper uniforms to enter Wildfire. And even then, Reid manages to give her Dr. Leavitt a crabby energy that makes her an appealing audience surrogate: She doesn’t want to be within a thousand miles of Andromeda, and neither do we.

Arrow’s new 4K edition is a straight UHD upgrade of the label’s 2019 Blu-ray, with the same supplemental package – Laurent Bouzereau’s making-of and Crichton interview from the earlier Universal releases, and Arrow’s “A New Strain of Science Fiction,” in which the critic and author Kim Newman spends half an hour discussing what he calls the “decontamination suit” subgenre, placing The Andromeda Strain in its proper context among decades of thrillers from Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets to Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion.

As with Warner’s recent 4K release of Soderbergh’s prophetic 2011 drama, the lack of any new material can’t help but feel like a missed opportunity; surely someone would have something to say about the movie in the post-COVID age. But even without a new perspective, this is a movie that benefits considerably from the additional detail and dynamic range – and if you’re coming to it from the earlier Universal Blu-ray, as I did, it’s a glorious upgrade. Universal’s disc was clearly mastered from a film print, marked by a juddering image and frequent speckling; Arrow went back to the original camera negative for a fresh 4K scan when producing their 2019 Blu-ray, and that same beautiful new master is what’s presented here, in UHD and HDR. There really is no comparison.

Odd as it sounds, Arrow’s new 4K editions of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X will be just as definitive, for fans of the ninth and tenth chapters in the Friday the 13^th saga.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never had much time for that particular franchise – it’s not especially stylish, it’s repetitive by design and Jason Voorhees was always just a dollar-store version of Michael Myers. But as the series aged and Jason became an indestructible zombie (Part VI: Jason Lives) the producers started throwing whatever they could at the property, which proved surprisingly elastic. A telekinetic teenager in The New Blood, a shipboard massacre in Jason Takes Manhattan, and finally a body-hopping marauder in Adam Marcus’ ninth installment, subtitled The Final Friday.

Jason Goes to Hell was the first Friday film released by New Line Cinema, which acquired the franchise after Paramount gave up on it after Jason Takes Manhattan. New Line had also released The Hidden a few years earlier, which is probably why no one sued the screenwriters of Jason Goes to Hell for lifting that movie’s central conceit wholesale – which is that after his latest rampage is ended in a hail of gunfire, Jason simply picks right back up in a new body, starting with the coroner performing his autopsy.

This is a very silly idea, but Marcus plays it reasonably straight, letting a series of game character actors show us their wrap-party impressions of Jason, stomping around murdering a few people before handing it off to the next player. Imagine if a Friday the 13^th movie were an improv exercise. It’s kind of like that.

Unlike The Hidden, there’s no good body-hopper on Jason’s trail, just bounty hunter Creighton Duke, played by Steven Williams in much the same testy impatience he brought to his recurring character in The X-Files. Eventually, and in an entirely preposterous way, Original Flavor Jason returns … just in time to get dragged to hell by demons and also Freddy Krueger.

See, New Line acquired the Friday series specifically to merge it with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but that crossover wouldn’t arrive for another decade. Before that, there’d be 2001’s Jason X.

Set sometime in the near future, Jason X – directed by Jim Isaac, a longtime effects producer for David Cronenberg – opens with Jason contained in a military cryogenics lab, where he’s about to be put into suspension by the level-headed Dr. Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig).

But things go wrong, Jason kills a bunch of jerks (including Cronenberg, in a fun cameo) and stabs Rowan just as she triggers the deep freeze – putting them both in suspension, where they’re discovered 450-odd years later by an anthropologist showing his horny grad students what's left of the original planet Earth.

Yep, Jason X understands the most important thing about the Friday the 13^th franchise, which is that wherever the human race goes, there will always be sexy idiots for Jason Voorhees to kill. And even though they revive Rowan first, healing her wounds with nanotechnology (and upgrading her wardrobe to “party at Barbarella’s house”), her warnings aren’t enough to stop the big guy from waking up and embracing the new methods of slaughter available to a hulking undead psychopath in the 25^th century.

It's a lot of fun. It’s dumb as a post, but it’s the right kind of dumb, and while my initial experience of Jason X was “eh, could have been worse” this time around I found it positively charming. Todd Farmer’s script is an unapologetic Aliens ripoff with just enough self-awareness to tapdance past the audience’s reflexive eyerolls. You want to see Jason in space? Here’s Jason in space, slashing his way through a cohort of young Toronto actors who look like they just found out their Canadian Buffy remake wasn’t going to go to series.

There’s also a cheerful robot (Lisa Ryder) who knows kung fu, an early appearance from the wonderful Amanda Brugel as a (doomed) security guard, and a holodeck that’s used to set up the single best joke in the entire franchise. Also, Mega Nanotech Super Jason. Four stars, no notes.

Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X were previously released on Blu-ray in franchise collections from Warner and Shout, but Arrow’s discs mark the 4K editions of either sequel. Both the theatrical and unrated versions of Jason Goes to Hell have been remastered from the original camera negative, each on its own 4K disc with the relevant supplements.

They look like they were shot last week; and I really hope the celluloid revival makes it to slasher cinema, because nothing says “low-budget retro” like organic film grain. Audio options are DTS-HD 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo; they’re the same on Jason X.

Arrow’s notes for that disc indicate the same restoration process for Jason X, but it’s a little more complicated than just a scan of the camera negative: Isaacs’ film was the first 35mm feature to be post-produced entirely in HD, then output back to 35mm for distribution – meaning all edits, color timing, visual effects, etc. were done in the digital realm. The image still looks very good, and the practical effects look great, but the CG suffers more than it should, with a slight softness to those shots made obvious in the darker HDR grade. But since this franchise is not exactly associated with sleek, glossy cinematography – and since you’re almost certainly picking up this limited edition because you already love this movie – I expect this will not be a deal-breaker.

In addition to the considerable supplements produced when both films were included in Shout’s 2020 complete-series Blu-ray box, Arrow has commissioned new extras for each film. Jason Goes to Hell’s unrated cut adds a new audio commentary from Michael Felsher and Steve “Uncle Creepy” Barton to the previous tracks director Marcus recorded with screenwriter Dean Lorey (for the New Line DVD) and author Peter Bracke (for the Shout Blu); in addition to the extras from the previous editions, the theatrical platter offers new interviews with composer Harry Manfredini, makeup effects artist Robert Kurtzman and co-star Julie Michaels, who plays the undercover FBI agent who goes all Final Girl in the film’s opening sequence.

Jason X also gets a new Felsher-Barton commentary, interviews with Manfredini and screenwriter Todd Farmer and a half-hour making-of, “Outta Space: The Making of Jason X,” which finds most of the surviving crew feeling pretty content with their work on this dopey movie. They all knew what it was. That’s why it’s fun.

 The Andromeda Strain, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X are available now in 4K limited editions from Arrow Video. In Canada, you can find all of them at Unobstructed View!

And congratulations to Eric J, winner of the 4K edition of Mickey 17 courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment! I’ll be in touch tomorrow to get your mailing details – aren’t you glad you read this far?

Up next: Turns out Black Bag won’t be out in Canada until next week, so we’ll have to hold off on celebrating Steven Soderbergh. But Criterion’s 4K editions of Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising just hit the street, so that’ll do fine.