Mask Maker (2010)

Back in the 80s, horror fans had an embarassment of riches when it came to horror icons.  Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Pinhead...  hell, even Chucky.  All were actively slicing and dicing teenagers with abandon in this heyday of horror.  But then the well pretty much dried up when we hit the 90s.  The horror heavyweights went into a slump and their ranks were only freshened by the addition of Scream's Ghostface (which didn't really count anyway, since it was somebody different every time.)  In the 00s, you could say that Saw's Jigsaw joined the horror pantheon, but his was a different kind of horror series.  The slasher subgenre needed a new (anti-)hero.

Victor Crowley in the Hatchet films fit the bill, but the movies were too gory and esoteric for mainstream horror audiences to latch onto.  Now, with each and every horror legend getting a remake, is there anybody out there that can bring us a new and interesting slasher villain to root for/against?

The makers of 2010's Mask Maker gave it a pretty good shot.

Starring... umm...  Well, at least Treat Williams has a cameo.

Mask Maker (another Netflix Instant Queue find) tells the story of a young couple who buy a great big house in the country for super-cheap, intending to fix it up and flip it for a fortune.  Little did they know that the house once was home to Leonard, a deformed man who, along with his voodoo-witch mother, was murdered by the local townsfolk years ago.  As anyone who has ever seen a movie could predict, Leonard was awakened to blood-thirsty life by the new owners of the house. Mayhem ensues.

My brief description makes Leonard's origin sound hackneyed and pedestrian, but it really has a lot going for it: voodoo/witchcraft, illicit love affairs, child-endangerment, murder...  At any rate, it's plenty to get the ball rolling on Leonard's killing spree.  And spree he does, dispatching victims with machetes, axes, pitchforks, screwdrivers (the handle end!) and other assorted implements.  And with each one that goes down, Leonard peels the skin off of their heads to use as masks to cover his own hideous fleshless face.  Nice.

Leonard! You'd better eat your Chunky soup!

The movie goes a lot further to set up the story than you might expect.  Like the early Friday the 13ths, you get a lot of the characters working around the main location, going into town and interacting with the locals, and so forth.  It takes around an hour for the killer to really get his momentum, but with the occasional one-off murder, amusing characters, and violent flashbacks that fill in the backstory, the movie doesn't bog down.

I didn't really know what to expect when I fired up Mask Maker.  I was pleasantly surprised when I realized it was a slasher and not the torture-y, hillbilly cannibal type flick I feared it might be.  In the end, I really liked Leonard as a potential franchise killer.  He had creativity, a good look, a good backstory, and a good gimmick.  Mask Maker wasn't precisely "original," as it borrowed heavily from Friday the 13th (particularly part two) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (minus the chainsaw).  But it was still refreshing.

I hope the movie is getting enough exposure on the IQ to warrant a sequel.  If they do get to make a franchise out of Mask Maker, they'll have to stop at the fifth movie, though.  I, for one, don't want any part of seeing Leonard, Part 6 again.