Mask Maker

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.

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.

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

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.

I know they remade Friday 13th, but Mask Maker feels almost like they've remade the remake. Seriously, 'modern' slasher films, i.e. those with a - seemingly - indestructible undead serial killer have been around for nearly forty years, yet, in that time, film-makers don't seem to have been able to come up with anything more inspiring that 'teenage couples have sex and die.' If any couple partakes in pre-marital sex, you can write them off the cast list (same goes for any nudity at all).

Mask Maker is about your average undead serial killer, stalking a load of annoyingly-attractive American teens in a big house two of them have recently bought. There are attempts at explaining why he's undead, but it doesn't really matter. His 'gimmick' is that he doesn't really have a face and he rips off victims' faces and uses them as his own (didn't they do that in Texas Chainsaw?). It's worth noting that if you're wearing an ill-fitting, blood-soaked, torn-off mask of someone, all your friends will instantly think you're really them and not bother asking questions until you've hacked them to bits.

Talking about hacking people to bits, the death scenes are particularly uninspiring. Yes, there's a bit of blood, but nothing very original.

It's predictable too. No major plot surprises here. The clichés come thick and fast, especially with the 'locals who always know something' about the horror that is to come.

Basically, if you're into films with undead killers stalking dumb teens, just stick to Friday 13th. It may be a little old by now, but it's still better than this.

Oh, and if you're thinking of buying a property, get your solicitor to check that no psychotic undead serial killers aren't buried somewhere on the premises. If you find out there are, I recommend returning to the estate agents and looking for somewhere else.