Maskhead (2009) Reviews

• One of the worst films I have ever seen.

  poolandrews2010-04-11

  Maskhead starts as fetish porn producers Syl (Shelby Vogel) & Maddie (Danniella Inks) are holding auditions for aspiring actor's & actresses to appear in their seemingly tame fetish videos, there seems to be no shortage of applicant's who need to make some money & take part in the videos. The videos range from food sex to clown fetish but what the wouldbe actor's don't know is that the videos turn nasty, a big hulking man known only as Maskhead (Michael Witherel) gatecrashes the videos & promptly tortures & kills anyone foolish enough to participate. Apparently there's a big market for snuff films as Maskhead is kept very busy... Directed by both Scott Swan who also wrote this thing & Fred Vogel who was one of the producers I have to say right from the start of this comment that I hated Maskhead, I thought it was one of the worst films I have ever seen (I have 3000 plus comments on IMDb & have seen many more before I even started writing comments here) & that's a lot of films to be the bottom of the pile of. For a start this is no plot, seriously Maskhead is as basic & underwritten, unadventurous & boring a film I have ever sat though. There are huge chunks of time spent showing potential victims interviews which add nothing, there's some crap about a Cowboy who hangs around mens toilets & to make matters even worse it's actually pretty tame. None of the murders are particularly imaginative or memorable or graphic while the fetish apart of the film is also disappointing with no eroticism to be seen anywhere, a woman dressed as a clown popping balloons, a man acting like a dog & a woman playing with food is as dull as it sounds, I suppose if you have one of these fetishes then Maskhead is a dream come true but to anyone else this is flat unerotic boredom at it's most embarrassing worst. The character's are awful, we never know why they do what they do, is for the money or the pleasure? How about a little motivation or reason? We never know how they get away with it, making videos showing people being murdered is a sure fire way to have the cops knocking on your door, right? We never find anything out about Maskhead, again who he is or what he does other than kill people. None of the people they kill are proper people, just cardboard cutouts & why are none of them ever missed? There are no subplots, no twists or turns & at 88 minutes it's horribly overlong. Besides being a film devoid of any character's, any sort of plot or attempt at originality Maskhead has awful production values & looks like it was shot on a camcorder & I am pretty sure it was. Whenever we see one of the fetish videos from the cameras point of view the makers have decided to slap these black bars down either side of the screen for no apparent reason. The gore is actually quite tame, there's some blood splatter, someone is stabbed in the chest, an arm is broken & a bone sticks out when a woman has her arms cut open before an ending in which Maskhead rapes a woman with a huge wooden dildo in an embarrassingly bad scene with lousy effects (blood that looks like water, Maskhead not moving at all in the long shots while the close-up the wooden dildo is pumping). The film-making choices are also bad, there's an awful scene in which a fat Cowboy bloke has sex & the lights flicker on & off or something so there's this constant flickering which just annoyed me. The nudity is also surprisingly tame, there are a few bare breasts but nothing else & the scene in which the fat Cowby wearing a Cowboy hat & leather waistcoat fisting a male prostitute is unintentionally funny with the silly sound effects (just listen has he lubes his arm up) & the awful camera angle as it's placed about 20 feet away from the 'action'. The rock music also sounds terrible & gave me a headache. The budget for this must have been minuscule, seriously did this cost more than a few thousand? The locations look like peoples homes, the special effects are poor, the fake blood is poor, the sound is poor, the cinematography is poor & the production values are real bottom of the barrel stuff. Maybe that was the point, I don't know but if it was then I need to ask the question what is film-making coming to when anyone with a camcorder & a few friends think they make a film? The acting is awful as well, the actor's look like they are reading their lines from cue cards & the screaming in the murder scenes is so fake. Maskhead is a terrible film & it's as simple & straight forward as that. I hated it, I hated every second of it & I am positive 99% of people will feel the same way. Maskhead has zero entertainment value, is an eyesore to watch & is quite frankly boring crap from start to finish.

• Like watching red paint dry...

  HowardRoarkII2010-02-03

  My goodness, was this a mistake... buying this DVD, that is. Well, I can save the empty DVD case, for possible future use. If you thought "August Underground" was kind of a badly made movie, let me tell you, AU is a well produced and high class product. In fact AU is not a badly made movie at all, I think it hits home (and most everywhere else) plus manage to find exactly the spot it is aiming for. "Maskhead" does not. "Maskhead" is not fun, neither intentionally or non-intentionally. "Maskhead" is not disgusting, not sexy (not even if you like bondage-porn, trust me), not horroresque, it is just boring, tedious and utterly pointless and, sorry guys, just kind of void of talent. (Makeup and effects are maybe not so bad...?) But, alas, this has to rate as one of the worst movies ever made, and not worst in any kind of good, camp, so-bad-it-is-good-way. Being boring and stupid is for me the ultimate unforgivable a movie can be... to be honest I watched ten minutes, then I couldn't take it any more but switched to fast forward, stopped here and there to no avail, and finally got to the end. Thank god. So the disc goes in the dust bin, and I will try to forget this embarrassing episode... Believe me, you have a lot more fun and find it a lot more interesting looking out your window, or if you do not have a window, staring at your wall.

• Mostly dull torture porn flick.

  HumanoidOfFlesh2010-09-29

  Two young lesbians Syl and Madie produce gruesome and gory fetish videos with the help of a gay cowboy.Actors or should I say potential victims show up to audition for Syl and Maddie and some of them are tortured to death and slowly butchered by Maskhead,a disfigured sadist."Maskhead" is not as disturbing as "August Undergorund" trilogy.Admittedly the final scene is pretty sick and disturbing and the gore effects by Jerami Cruise are excellent,but the interviews are dull and annoying.Several scenes are too long and lead to nowhere.The acting is decent and the film is awashed with pain and suffering,so it's not a total waste.More graphic nudity should be also mandatory in this kind of sicko horror.A generous 6 out of 10.

• This ain't Pinhead...

  celtcub2010-11-17

  Honestly watching this film I could see how it was made. The guys wanted to top the other films they had done, so they got a cast of actors willing to do softcore porn shots, wrote a flimsy storyline to support the gore and then Google'd several sexual fetishes to make the film even edgier. I will give them props for putting guys through the paces as well as girls. Honestly seeing men in these situations is far more interesting to me and there are so few films that even include them. However, it's still only a couple of scenes. The movie itself (minus the male skin) isn't really worth watching. The effects are passable (especially if you thought August underground was decent)and the acting is about what you'd expect from Toe Tag (which is to say a bunch of foul mouth Southern Good-Ole-Boys and Trailer Park Chicks). There are other and better gore films out there. This one is only for Toe Tag fans. And I think it's pretty clear that any rating over a 4 is from someone who was on set or sleeping with a cast member...

• The worst movie I have ever seen!

  souzaesai2013-04-07

  This movie is the worst I've seen b/c there was nothing original about it. It was just not good, pornographic, tasteless, and really an uncreative movie. This movie and "The Black Dahlia Haunting" inspired me and my friends to write and direct our own movie to show you guys how to actually make a movie. It's all about the acting guys. The writing has to actually be good and the cinematography can't be all awkward and amateurish like in this movie or The Haunting. Next time let's actually make a good movie alright guys? Stop this mindless stuff or you'll never make it in this business. I feel like the filmmakers just did all this crap in the movie just to get girls to take their clothes off in front of the camera. No this is not art so don't even try to justify it. It's a load of crap. Scott Swan and Fred Vogel are just a bunch of perverted and uncreative filmmakers.