Mask Maker

Please don't get me wrong, I did enjoy this movie. I just wanted to enjoy it a lot more than I did. See, in an age of remakes, I feel like it's really hard to find fun, original material so it makes it so much more rewarding when you do. But there's few things worse than feeling like you got the old bait and switch. And that's sort of how I feel about this movie.

Sure, the story and plot aren't exactly a rip off, it's just that someone wasn't trying hard...at all...to make it original. It's a stalk-and-slash movie (Haloween, Friday The 13th) where a guy makes masks out of his victims at an old, abandoned farm house (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). I wish there were more to it, but not really. That being said, don't let that alone turn you off of this movie. It really isn't without it's charms. The kills are fun, the actors actually do a pretty good job in their roles, and the effects are surprisingly good. If you want to just sit on the couch (preferably with some sort of adult beverage) and have some fun, this isn't the worst way you could do it. You just have to get past the relatively well-tread plot.

A witty script and an appealing cast almost save this otherwise rote slasher movie. A college business student gets a suspiciously good deal on a spooky empty old house in the country and buys it for his less-than-impressed girlfriend. The place is filled with valuable antiques (a plot angle that goes nowhere). The local general store, called "Pluto's", is run by Michael Berryman, an inside joke for THE HILLS HAVE EYES fans. The boyfriend notices a graveyard in back of the house and immediately elects to start wrecking it. He pulls a large ornamental pole out of a grave for no reason, inadvertantly resurrecting a mad slasher named Leonard who killed everybody in sight some 25 years before. One of the house's previous occupants was a woman who spoke French, which is sufficient to qualify her as a cliche' evil foreigner with magic powers. The typical gang of friends arrives to help renovate the place and to give the killer some people to bump off. The murderer is an unoriginal blend of Leatherface (a mentally ill victim of a childhood disease that caused his face to fall off, he peels the faces off his victims and wears them as masks), Jason Voorhees (he's a reanimated corpse with a mama fixation and can be fooled and temporarily calmed down by the sight of a girl wearing his mother's old clothes) and even the killer from TERROR TRAIN (each time he kills, he's wearing the "mask" taken from his previous victim). They might as well have called him Leonardface. Disappointingly, his 'real' face is never shown even though there's a lot of talk about how ugly he is. Guess they couldn't come up with an adequate makeup design. He clomps around stabbing and decapitating everyone until the telegraphed, by-the-numbers "evil triumphs" ending, which is more out of place than usual in a movie with such lighthearted dialogue. The acting is good and the snappy patter makes this a highly entertaining movie for most of its running time, and even the gore effects, lighting and cinematography are well above average for an entry in the teenkill genre. It's a shame that depressing ending is tacked on there, making the entire film feel like a waste of time. If you liked HATCHET's blend of funny scripting and FRIDAY THE 13TH style murders, you might enjoy this too. It was shot under the title MASKERADE.

When Jen's boyfriend buys her an old farm house sitting on top of 40 acres, she's at first mortified that he'd be so utterly stupid' but when she sees how hurt this makes him, she attempts to make the most of it not knowing that the child of the previous occupants still resides around the area and I've very productive of his mom old house.

Tired, generic slasher derivative that brings nothing at all new to the table. The back-story is a rather small variation of Jason Vorhees, the kills which one would think would be where Inovation could at least peek through is sadly lacking, almost every kill is mainly the same. I'd be hard pressed to even recommend this movie even to slasher genre aficionado, much less anyone else..

Eye Candy: Mariah Bonner shows some T&A, Anabella Casanove is briefly topless

Not quite the slasher film I was expecting but I still enjoyed it. A young couple and their friends start renovating an old house they have just bought, but not before unleashing the dead face stealing killer buried in the garden cemetery. Through use of flashbacks from the killers perspective and our heroin reading exerts from the killers mothers diary we get an insight into the happenings leading up to the creation of the stalking brute.

Not the most original plot as it's a cross between Halloween and the Texas chainsaw massacre but with less gore than those two movies. What really saved this film for me was the dialogue between all of the friends and the acting from such a young mostly unheard of cast. It made the characters relationships more believable than I'm used to seeing in this sort of movie and I actually liked all of them. Usually there's a couple of characters I hate and can't wait to see them get murdered, but I found myself quite disappointed to see some of them go. It was also great to see Michael Berryman again as well as Treat Williams even if they only had small roles.

The movie doesn't go all out on the gore front. A couple of the kills are almost off camera. The few kills you do see are done quite well but some quick cuts hamper you seeing exactly what you're looking at. What the film really relies on is the atmosphere created by the creepy house and the dank surrounding woodland. This really works as the setting is very remote and only adds to the feeling of dread. We have the killer Looming around the side of buildings in the background of some shots just like Michael Myers an often over used trick but done very well in this instance.

The only thing I didn't like was the ending a couple of things didn't quite work for me at the end but it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the movie overall. All in all this was a good little horror which I would recommend to fans of the genre.

What if your dream turned out to be a nightmare? After Jennifer's (Deloach) boyfriend Evan (Colletti) surprises her with a new house for her birthday strange things begin to happen. This is a hard movie to review. It is not that bad, but it drags, a lot. It's another haunted house because of something buried in the land movie that is not that bad, but it would have been a good "Fangoria Series" movie at an hour long, trying to stretch it out for an hour and a half really hurt the movie. If you are looking for a decent horror movie that is a cross between suspense and a slasher, this is a good choice. If you are looking for a very scary movie then I would go for something else. Not terrible, not great. I did like the ending though. I give it a C.

Would I watch again? - I doubt it.