Movie Reviews

The following is a re-post of an old review I’d written, which was lost when we changed to the new site format:

It’s not easy being a teen slasher; it requires tons of cardio work and upper-body training if you want to be able to keep up with fleeing victims or rip out a jock’s heart with a post-digger. Leslie Vernon, aspiring psychopath, invites a crew of grad school filmmakers to film a documentary about his daily routine and his carefully-planned act of systematically stalking a “survivor girl” (who must be a virgin) and murdering all of her stoner friends. Behind the Mask is, as you would expect, a satire of the slasher genre shot as a mockumentary. It’s a quirky indy gem that is far better than it ought to be because of the surprising strength of its actors, dozens of blink-and-you-miss-them homages to classic horror films, and its thoughtful post-modern deconstruction of almost every slasher cliché imaginable.

It’s got a lot of problems, though. Director Scott Glosserman shows a great deal of talent and flair for comedy, but the script doesn’t translate well to the screen. A lot more pre-production work in storyboarding might have solved these issues. Because of its documentary style, it’s filmed almost exclusively from the viewpoints of the two cameramen on handheld. Glosserman bemoans this restriction several times in the audio commentary, as it cripples his ability to play around with perspective as many horror films like to do. In fact, he abandons the documentary style whenever Leslie is about his grisly business, because there’s just no way to maintain it when you’re trying to emulate slasher movies as well. It’s not awfully done, but it ’s generally bad form to shift viewpoints from an objective third-party to an omniscient perspective and back again.

It’s a movie that demands a lot of suspension of disbelief, even for an obvious satire. Leslie Vernon desperately wants to be like the monstrous killers Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers, who, in the warped reality of this movie, actually existed and serve as historical role models. This works against the movie, surprisingly, since most of the slasher movie tropes Leslie explains to Taylor are cinematic clichés you would only notice on a movie screen. If Jason Voorhees and Michael are real, how could anyone possibly know about the infamous slasher “walk-run,” where Leslie forces himself to practice speed-walking, but then secretly running when his victims aren’t looking, then walking again when they turn around so that it always looks like he’s still walking. How else can he have the flight-patterns of his victims so well-charted if he hadn’t seen a horror flick? He even has terms like “having an Ahab,” a hero character who will stop at nothing to put an end to Leslie– like Dr. Loomis to Michael Myers, here played by Robert Englund.

I know it’s all a joke, but a lot of this movie would have played much better if the script acknowledged the existence of the movies instead of oddly choosing to make all of those iconic killers “real.” That way, much of Leslie’s behavior makes more sense. He would come off as more of a movie buff, because he already spends much of the movie framing perfect shots and pacing his upcoming slaughter so that the deaths are neatly spaced-out and artistically-done to heighten the dramatic effect. It would also do a great deal to explain why filmmaker Taylor isn’t far more horrified that Leslie openly boasts at being a serial killer and plans to murder upwards of ten people in one night. In a world where dozens of slashers like Jason Voorhees and Leatherface have gone on innumerable rampages, it’s hard to believe that Taylor wouldn’t take Leslie very seriously.

Of course, Leslie is dead serious, and at some point Taylor has to ask herself whether or not she can stand idly by and let this continue– pointing out yet another flaw: why would Taylor participate in such a project if there was any indication at all that it might not be a joke? Actually, the director says in a commentary that the film originally ends with Taylor going on trial as an accessory to murder. It’s another indication that the documentary concept just isn’t thought-out enough, and the script probably could have used some revisions to hammer out some of the larger gaps in logic like that. It’s just hard to figure out how Taylor believes that Leslie is serious about his proposed massacre, thinks this would be a good student film project, and yet is dreadfully unprepared when it turns out that hanging out with Leslie is like playing with napalm.

It’s a cute movie. Maybe a little too cute. I had fun with it, though. Think of it as the spiritual successor to Scream’s “rules to survive a horror movie” gimmick, to which Behind the Mask suggests “run like a motherfucker, and don’t stop ’til daybreak.” It’s definitely worth a rental, but I don’t think Glosserman can really be happy with the final product. There was a ton of potential here if only they’d managed to hit that vital third-act out of the park. It’s a charming diversion that could have been a cult classic with a little tweeking.

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There’s been a lot of interest in Thai action flicks ever since Tony Jaa kickboxed his way into American theaters with the brutal and impactful Ong-Bak, a film about a country bumpkin tasked with recovering the village’s stolen holy Buddha statue’s head, which was stolen by gangsters because…uh…um…well they stole it, and the reluctant hero cripples untold hundreds of low-rent goons using the village’s bone-crushing Muay Thai techniques. It was pretty much on the same dramatic level as playing The Adventures of Bayou Billy, with a two-ton bronze Buddha head standing in for a girlfriend– but the fight choreography was so hard-hitting and just so goddamn painful to watch that it was hard not to “OOH” and “AAH” in sympathy for the hapless dopes lined up to fight Tony in each level– I mean, scene.

I think people were a little too eager to pass the action-star torch to Tony Jaa. In fact, Jackie Chan might as well have been carrying a golden flaming brand marked “You Sir, Are The Man” when he appeared in his brief cameo in the much-anticipated follow-up, The Protector, a film about a country bumpkin tasked with recovering the village’s stolen holy elephant, which was stolen by gangsters because…uh…um…oh, wait, I remember this one! The gangsters stole the elephant so that they could slaughter it, cover its bones in gold, and erect them behind their leader’s throne, both because legend holds that elephants confer immortality, and because it looked really cool.

It was a skin-peelingly stupid movie– in fact, I believe I went on record saying that the editing, direction and scriptwriting were lazier than even Plan 9 From Outer Space, which at least managed to tell a semi-coherent narrative. Characters would teleport in and out of scenes, appearing out of sheer plot convenience to find other characters even though they should have no possible knowledge where in all of Thailand they might be. The plot, which at face value is virtually identical to the previous movie, is somehow horribly convoluted to involve subplots about crooked cops and an incriminating video tape so that even the simple premise of “find bad guy, get elephant back” is rendered totally mystifying. And I’m pretty sure Tony Jaa’s only lines in two hours are shrieking “WHERE’S MY ELEPHANT?!!??!”

So while everyone else on the Internet was abuzz with excitement over Chocolate, made by the same director as The Protector and Ong-Bak, I took a rather grouchy wait-and-see stance. The story is as paper-thin as anything else the guy’s made, although I will grant you that it’s unlike anything else I’ve seen before. It’s about a girl named Zen, the autistic daughter of a Yakuza enforcer who becomes an idiot savant of martial arts by obsessively watching kung-fu movies. When her mother– also a former mob boss– becomes terribly ill, Zen’s brother Mike works desperately to pay for her medication. In desperation, he takes Zen to collect money from their mother’s former mob associates. Even he’s not fully aware of Zen’s prowess until their attempts to beg for money are met with scorn and violence, which awakens a kung-fu buzzsaw inside of Zen. Combined with her preternatural autistic ability to focus and her ungodly retard strength, she tears apart the entire Yakuza power structure.

Which you’ve gotta admit, sounds pretty freaking hardcore. Although I made up the part about ungodly retard strength. I’m not sure whether or not you should be offended by the concept. The movie isn’t exactly laughing at autism, but it’s certainly not taking the condition seriously.

There’s a lot to like about this movie, and it’s clearly been written and made by people with a real love and respect for the martial arts genre. Being a huge fan of the genre myself, you could analyze every single move, location, and plot element to find a shout-out to another movie. There’s a fight inside an ice-cutting factory, which causes Zen to re-create Bruce Lee’s moves and mannerisms from The Big Boss, as well as references to Kill Bill, The Matrix, you name it. My favorite was a quiet moment where Zen flips pieces of chocolate into her mouth like Jackie Chan in Operation Condor.

Anyway, the film is largely repetitive through the first hour. Zen approaches a criminal figure in his ice/pork/chocolate factory, asks for money, gets rebuked, asks again, and the guy finally gets annoyed enough that he orders his army of fanatically-loyal minimum-wage workers to attack, who then promptly get the shit kicked out of them. Then she gets the money and finds another factory. The real highlight of the film comes near the end when, unable to stop Zen’s fists of fury, the Yakuza do the only sensible thing:

They get their own retarded dude.

Well what else would you do?

It’s a classic showdown where Zen’s eiditic memory of mindless goon tactics fail her against the “Epileptic Boxer” and his twitchy, flailing fighting technique I’ve dubbed Spaz Fu. He’s not really epileptic as the credits have named him. His constant thrashing and grunting is more symptomatic of someone with Tourette’s Syndrome. Even so, it’s a truly surreal moment, and a first for action cinema watching a breakdancing, spastic Yakuza legbreaker who’s managed to not only overcome Tourette’s, but has turned it into a deadly martial arts weapon.

So yeah, I had a lot of fun with it, and I’m pretty sure you would too.

Here’s my problem, and believe me, I feel bad bringing this up knowing how many people busted their asses (literally) to make this movie.

It’s not very well made.

I’m sorry, it’s not. I liked the characters, I liked the premise, and I admire the choreography and athleticism of the action scenes. Really, the physicality is breathtaking. But I wasn’t really watching a fight; I was watching a dance. It looks choreographed. Every move, every stunt, every hit, it’s like they’re all moving at three-quarters speed. The punches and kicks are too slow, they don’t look like they’re connecting, and they don’t look like they’re delivered with any kind of force. It looks like they’re play-fighting instead of actually fighting, and that’s something Jackie Chan would never have stood for.

Just go and watch one of Jackie’s movies. The guy looks like he’s fighting for his life in every single fight. He moves with speed, his punches have SNAP to them, and when he gets hit, it looks like it fucking hurts. Once you realize how much he has to keep in his head, the precision of his attacks, the timing of his moves, and he still manages to act, it speaks a lot for his physical and dramatic talents. Jackie would hate this movie because the choreography is slow, sloppy, and violates some of his cardinal rules. It looks staged. The worst thing any stuntman can do in a movie like this is wait to get hit, literally holding up and staring slack-jawed for a half-second while the hero wheels about and kicks him in the face. It looks bad, and that’s basically every hit in this movie.

I guess that means I’m still not ready to pass the torch to anyone. Chocolate was good, but all it could do was pantomime great movies.

Too bad.

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