Mask Maker (2010)

This was one of many little known movies my good friend filmmaker Jeff Burr sent me to look at, feeling I may get a kick out of some of them. This was the only one that actually came with a DVD case and it looked interesting enough: a guy with a hatchet and skinned faces hanging from trees around a house, giving it the appearance of a slasher movie with the feel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Wasn't expecting anything groundbreaking but it looked like it could be a gory fun time. Summation: it was okay. I was right in that it was nothing special and the premise is cobbled together from a bunch of other horror films but it's not horrible. (The title itself is weird. The DVD cover says Meet Your Maker under the title, which I assumed was a tagline but it actually appears as part of the title in the film. I don't know if that was a mistake or what but I'd never seen that happen before.)

College student Jennifer is surprised when her boyfriend Evan takes her out to a large old mansion in the South. He reveals to her that he purchased it for a fairly cheap price and plans to use the investment to pay off their student loans and eventually get married. Jennifer is at first skeptical but when she realizes how sincere he really is, she goes along with it. While investigating the house and grounds, Evan comes across a strange grave in the woods near the house. He pulls a pole stuck in the mound out and notices a strange object hanging from the top. Not long afterward when they visit the town store, they notice a couple of the locals seem a little disturbed about the fact that they've bought the house. Their friends come out to celebrate Jennifer's birthday but a mysterious man begins picking them off one by one and flaying off their faces. Jennifer eventually learns the horrific history behind the house and then must survive against the killer, who happens to be one of the former residents who won't stay dead.

The young actors in this film aren't the best but they're acceptable and not that annoying or loathsome. Nikki Deloach and Stephen Colletti are decent as Jennifer and Evan. Neither of them are the best actors in the world, particularly Deloach, but they're a likable young couple who are trying to get their own life started. There's a hint that they've been off and on a lot in the past but it's never expanded upon. Unlike most lead slasher characters, both of them are dead by the end of the movie and also, both deaths are fairly unexpected. The other four college students are typical slasher fodder. My favorite was Ross Britz as Mike because he seemed like a laid back, fun-loving jokester of a guy. Not much to say about A.J. Allegra as Ken other than he's kind of brainy but is as sex-starved as the others. I can't tell you the difference between the other two girls, Annette (Anabella Casanova) and Hillary (Mariah Bonner), because they're interchangeable for the most part. I remember Hillary mainly for her and Ken doing Russian accents before and after they have sex for some reason. I only remember Annette because she supposedly wasn't going to bang Mike during the weekend and they even bet on it but she does anyway. (I may be getting her confused with the other girl. Again, there's nothing distinctive about them at all.)

Like most independent horror films nowadays, this film does have some recognizable genre favorites in the cast as well. Michael Berryman from the original The Hills Have Eyes plays Fred, the owner of a store in the small town near the house. Not much to say about him as he's not in the movie that much but he feels like a nice guy who's concerned about what's going on at the house, particularly towards his friend Mr. Peck. And that brings me to the best actor in this film by far: Terry Kiser. He's very good as Mr. Peck, who lost his infant child years ago to a voodoo-style sacrifice and killed the monster, Leonard, that he was sacrificed to. He's now a paranoid drunk who knows what will happen if Leonard is unleashed and when he discovers that that's exactly what's happened, he takes matters into his own hands. Kiser is the man in the movie's climax, where he takes on Leonard, mocking him and fighting back against him, even after he's stabbed in the back with an axe. It's too bad that he dies near the end because he was awesome. One last character who I thought was completely unnecessary was Joe Chrest as this pervy electric worker who comes out to turn the power on in the house. This guy is a complete scumbag who intentionally scares Evan when he's investigating Leonard's grave and then says, "I'm here to turn you on... your power?" He's the first to get killed, which is good, but that wasn't necessary at all.

The killer, Leonard Tucker, is a supernatural mixture of Leatherface and Jason Voorhees. From what I can gather, he's a child that the former man of the house had with a French maid. He was born retarded and when he became an adult, he developed a skin condition that ate away the flesh on his face. His mother tries to use voodoo to sacrifice Mr. Peck's child and presumably heal Leonard's sickness but she's killed before she can complete it and Leonard is killed shortly after. Apparently, though, the voodoo spell that was cast made Leonard undead and unless he's buried with this pole jammed into him, he'll come back to life. I'm guessing that's what the trick is. It doesn't explain everything particularly well. Jonathan Breck, who played the Creeper in the Jeepers Creepers movies, plays Leonard and he does a pretty good job. Like I said, he's basically playing Jason, only he's skinning and wearing his victims' faces like Leatherface (in fact, the idea of him doing this because his real face has been eaten away by a disease is very similar to the characterization of Leatherface in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as that movie's prequel). There's even a moment where Jennifer pretends to be Leonard's mother, similar to the climax of Friday the 13th Part 2, and Leonard's "death" is similar to Jason's in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Breck is fairly intimidating and the kills are nice and gory. The ending, though, made me roll my eyes because it's typical sequel-bait. I doubt a sequel to this will ever be made.

As I said, the kills are good gory slasher movie fun. The first kill, the sleazy electric worker, looks like he got something shoved right through his head. Ken is killed by first having his throat slit and then his head being twisted around (another very Jason-esque kill). I can't remember how Hillary gets it. I think she gets decapitated. Mike gets butchered basically when he's attacked in the house's basement. Annette gets decapitated while in a bathtub. Evan's death came as a shock because I honestly wasn't expecting him to die, since both members of the main couple in slasher movies usually survive. He first gets stabbed in the gut with a pitchfork but that doesn't kill him. Later on, Jennifer finds him alive but wounded in Leonard's lair but before she can save him, he's decapitated in a really unexpected kill. The build-up to that kill was filmed quite well and the payoff was surprising, so I really commend this film on that. Mr. Peck, as I said, gets an axe in the back but he doesn't die from it right away. Finally, before she can destroy Leonard for good, Jennifer is stopped by the police, who stupidly remove the pole shoved into him. Leonard eventually finds Jennifer, having killed and wearing the skinned face of a police officer, and snaps her neck before putting her body in the squad car and driving away, ending the movie. That was a surprising ending, don't get me wrong, but after the initial shock was over, the fatigue set in, like, "Really? You're trying to sequel-bait me? That's pretty lame."

There is some good music in the film as well. Nathan Furst composed a fairly memorable main theme that is haunting enough to give the movie a fairly creepy atmosphere. None of the other music is that memorable and the ending theme is some really bad heavy metal music but I'm glad that he did give the movie a memorable main theme, if nothing else.

Like many of these recent horror flicks, writer and director Griff Furst clearly meant for Mask Maker to be an ode to horror films. Besides the ones I've referenced, it has some odes to The Silence of the Lambs and The Last House on the Left, as well as a little bit of The Evil Dead with the movie occurring in a house in the middle of nowhere. It may not be anything new and it's honestly kind of forgettable but it didn't try to pass itself off as a full-blooded throwback to 80's slasher movies with a lot of internet hype like Hatchet did and Furst doesn't make you feel like you should kiss this movie's butt. The movie is clearly cheap (you can tell the driving scenes are in front of a green screen) but horror movies don't need big budgets to be effective. All in all, not awful but not something I'll watch again. I do suggest seeing it at least once if you're bored and want to watch a slasher movie.