Director: Lawrence Guterman
Writer: Lance Khazei
Holy hell do I feel abused. I'm not even exaggerating, I genuinely feel assaulted and abused. The imagery in this is horrific, the writing is terrible and nobody knows how the hell to back away from the fucking wide angle lens half the time. There's a line from Tim Avery's (Jamie Kennedy) boss, Daniel Moss (Steven Wright), where he's talking about the mask character he saw at the previous night's Halloween party, he says Quote: "This could be a franchise character" and after the 15 - 20 minutes of...mildly freaky shit I'm thinking no...you're trying but no, that's not happening. If there was a way I could get across how exasperated I am with this film I would 100% write it out a thousand times in place of what I'm about to write. But I can't. Words to describe how I feel about this do not exist. Fuck. Let's just get into it.
First of all, the majority of my notes for this were "This needs to stop." "Fuck off." "Stop it." "What the fuck?" and "Why." To start off this assault on your senses we see Loki (Alan Cumming) detach Dr Neuman's (Ben Stein) face and floats it into a museum display. This is only a small insight into what will later come. We then get Tim's imagination into what having a baby is like, hundreds of little vampires shooting out of his wife while she files her nails while doctors catch them like American footballs. I have no idea how I even feel about this, is it misogynistic? Are they implying he has no idea how birth works? All I know is I was a little scared.
Then there's a scene where, after Tim puts on the mask and goes to his work's Halloween party. He puts the mask on and the car quite literally becomes electrified with all kinds of green smoke coming off of it. He stretches his leg all the way up to the front door where there's a guard waiting for him and he, of course, asks for his ID. Mask-Tim decides to fuck around for a little bit and not be funny, until a good 2 minutes of screen time later so that's what? 10 minutes movie time? He pulls out an ID of Mask-Tim, not normal Tim, Mask-Tim with his freaky, fake, plastic MacDonald's happy meal toy face on it....And he gets let in...Yeah. So I'm assuming the doorman loses his job after that and we then move onto Mask-Tim eyeballing some girl his friend fancies but it's not like in a normal cartoon where the eyes comedically stretch out and it's just the whites of the eyes you see along with the iris and pupil. Oh no. This fucker goes the extra mile and adds the veins in for detail that all cartoons lack.
We're then assaulted more by a musical number that assaults your vision by Mask-Tim gyrating in wide angle lens, assaults your hearing by performing I Love You Baby in 5 different genres of music, all terribly, and it manages to assault your sense of safety by cleverly having the wide angle lens so wide that you don't even need to see this in 3D to feel like you're gonna get eaten by Jamie Kennedy. You just feel like he's about to come out of the screen and just swallow you whole like Monstro in Pinocchio. It also manages to insult both choreographers and dancers. How? Because the wide angle is so wide and Jamie Kennedy's botched plastic surgery face is filling the screen, you cannot see the dancers behind him. Every so often they get a few seconds but that's it. Why put so much effort into choreographing all of this and getting talented dancers to not showcase their work. Might as well not even put them in the credits at all. I wouldn't even be so bothered if it even felt short, like if it only felt around a minute or two long. It doesn't. It feels like it's taken up a good 20 minutes of your time. That's 20 minutes of my life I could have been working out, eating healthier, working on my skills as a writer or a performer but no. This one scene alone drained most of my energy.
Once that part of the assault is over he goes home wearing the mask and gets his wife pregnant. You see how the mask gets her pregnant too, and they don't show a sex scene, they show sperm fighting to get to the egg with some of the scariest fucking animation I have ever seen. Like...I think it's meant to be similar to watching the creation of your worst nightmare and if that's what the animators were going for then...ya did good guys. Ya did good. Honestly, words escape me to even describe the horror that is that scene. The next day Tim's wife Tonya (Taylor Howard) feels Quote: "Kinda funky" and logically, she thinks she's pregnant. I mean, that's a rational way of thinking, I feel kinda funky after watching this, so...did this film get me pregnant? I seriously hope not. But anyway, it turns out that her feeling kinda funky means she is pregnant and while she's in the doctor's office she feels sick so asks for a trashcan. Understandable if she felt she couldn't make it to the bathroom but I don't think that would matter considering she vomits bubbles. I have no way of commenting on that other than the doctor doesn't freak out and get her locked up for testing even though he admits it's not a normal thing to do. All I can say is that these two need a better doctor. Throughout her pregnancy, Tonya eats Silly String which I'm pretty sure contains a lot of chemicals that aren't safe for consumption, but she eats it on a cracker so I guess that's just fucking fine. They then go to a baby scene where the baby performs Cuban Pete for a few seconds along with Freak Out and 1) she doesn't even feel it. 2) She's not even looking at the screen at her baby. 3) Realistically she'd be dead or dying if that happened to her. I just...
Once all that's done with the worst of this...abomination of cinema are the fight scenes between the baby and the dog and the baby trying to make Tim insane because he saw that classic Warner Brothers cartoon with the frog singing vaudeville and thinks that that's where Tim belongs because it'll be fun to mess with him and explanations are only for the people who pay attention to films. The animation is scary. I can't lie. I won't lie. The animation on the baby looks cheap and like they had superimposed a man's face onto a CGI babies body and tried to make it look younger. The dog looks like he had a bit more of a budget but that doesn't help when apparently the animators know what Satan's pooch looks like and decided to bring his likeness to the big screen. Yeah, this thing is fucking scary. There's a scene where he's getting dragged through the kitchen or something I wasn't paying much attention to the surroundings considering I was pretty scared. As I said, though, the dogs getting dragged backwards and his eyes leave their sockets leaving black holes in their place. Have the eyes shoot out, by all means, that's what cartoons do but don't make the eyes leave their sockets. The eyes are the most expressive part of the face, once you take those away the face becomes mostly expressionless and any expression that is conveyed may come across as something else. I don't know what it came across as here, I was too busy pissing myself in fear.
There's even a scene where Tim is sick of having this thing torment him so he puts it in its car seat and gets in the car. He says to the baby Quote: "First, I'm gonna take you to a paediatrician, then I'm taking you to an exorcist." THEN THE BABY SPINS HIS HEAD AND VOMITS ILLUMINOUS GREEN SHIT!! WHAT KID IS EVEN GOING TO GET THAT REFERENCE?! Fuck me. The worst part about this bit? You hear bones cracking as this....thing's head is spinning. And it does it slower than in The Exorcist. At least in that Regan just spins and voms. Here no, they want to traumatise your kid, they do it slowly and you even see a slight struggle in this thing moving its head at first and I'm honestly just sitting here thinking...this shouldn't be in a kids film. It's like in the Alvin & The Chipmunks sequel...excuse me Squeakquel...(I hate that Grammarly corrected my spelling on that) that there was a Silence Of The Lambs reference. Are kids just getting into horror at a younger age nowadays while some grown adults find things like opposing opinions, males and pale skin colours offensive? Come for me SJW's, for I am dead inside, and this movie killed me.
After that, it's mostly just the fact that every single parent in this film is terrible at being parents. I'm not even joking. Odin (Bob Hoskins) doesn't listen to Loki. Loki only wants the baby who would technically be his son, to play with and not be a father to. Tim doesn't know how to look after the baby after almost glassing him during a night feed and insisting that Tonya takes the baby with her to New York on her business trip. And Tonya is probably the worst of them all. She didn't get up during the night feed, didn't think about the baby when Loki decides he's going to keep him, oh no, she's more interested in the fact that when Tim puts on the mask he's hot. I'm not even joking, she literally says Quote: "Honey, you look hot." At that point I had to pause the film and think about my life choices. I even thought about hers for a moment, has she gotten any good work after this? Did she see the premier of the film and think "fuck...nobodies going to hire me after that scene."
I know I've said in previous posts that it's good to scare children and that it's, in a way, necessary. Do not show them this. This is in a whole new world of scary, this doesn't ease your child into an uncomfortable atmosphere it just kinda starts off darkly lit and then Ben Steins face fucking comes off. It's horrific, do not show your kid this unless you think they can handle a true horror film.
I really wish I wanted to talk more about this but...I don't. This film hurt me in places I never thought I could be hurt. I have a headache from this film, I feel dizzy and sick after watching it. If you want to watch this then I'll give you some advice:
This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this film (and God bless you if you do) then go and support its creators by buying the DVD or Bluray.
First of all, the majority of my notes for this were "This needs to stop." "Fuck off." "Stop it." "What the fuck?" and "Why." To start off this assault on your senses we see Loki (Alan Cumming) detach Dr Neuman's (Ben Stein) face and floats it into a museum display. This is only a small insight into what will later come. We then get Tim's imagination into what having a baby is like, hundreds of little vampires shooting out of his wife while she files her nails while doctors catch them like American footballs. I have no idea how I even feel about this, is it misogynistic? Are they implying he has no idea how birth works? All I know is I was a little scared.
Then there's a scene where, after Tim puts on the mask and goes to his work's Halloween party. He puts the mask on and the car quite literally becomes electrified with all kinds of green smoke coming off of it. He stretches his leg all the way up to the front door where there's a guard waiting for him and he, of course, asks for his ID. Mask-Tim decides to fuck around for a little bit and not be funny, until a good 2 minutes of screen time later so that's what? 10 minutes movie time? He pulls out an ID of Mask-Tim, not normal Tim, Mask-Tim with his freaky, fake, plastic MacDonald's happy meal toy face on it....And he gets let in...Yeah. So I'm assuming the doorman loses his job after that and we then move onto Mask-Tim eyeballing some girl his friend fancies but it's not like in a normal cartoon where the eyes comedically stretch out and it's just the whites of the eyes you see along with the iris and pupil. Oh no. This fucker goes the extra mile and adds the veins in for detail that all cartoons lack.
We're then assaulted more by a musical number that assaults your vision by Mask-Tim gyrating in wide angle lens, assaults your hearing by performing I Love You Baby in 5 different genres of music, all terribly, and it manages to assault your sense of safety by cleverly having the wide angle lens so wide that you don't even need to see this in 3D to feel like you're gonna get eaten by Jamie Kennedy. You just feel like he's about to come out of the screen and just swallow you whole like Monstro in Pinocchio. It also manages to insult both choreographers and dancers. How? Because the wide angle is so wide and Jamie Kennedy's botched plastic surgery face is filling the screen, you cannot see the dancers behind him. Every so often they get a few seconds but that's it. Why put so much effort into choreographing all of this and getting talented dancers to not showcase their work. Might as well not even put them in the credits at all. I wouldn't even be so bothered if it even felt short, like if it only felt around a minute or two long. It doesn't. It feels like it's taken up a good 20 minutes of your time. That's 20 minutes of my life I could have been working out, eating healthier, working on my skills as a writer or a performer but no. This one scene alone drained most of my energy.
Once that part of the assault is over he goes home wearing the mask and gets his wife pregnant. You see how the mask gets her pregnant too, and they don't show a sex scene, they show sperm fighting to get to the egg with some of the scariest fucking animation I have ever seen. Like...I think it's meant to be similar to watching the creation of your worst nightmare and if that's what the animators were going for then...ya did good guys. Ya did good. Honestly, words escape me to even describe the horror that is that scene. The next day Tim's wife Tonya (Taylor Howard) feels Quote: "Kinda funky" and logically, she thinks she's pregnant. I mean, that's a rational way of thinking, I feel kinda funky after watching this, so...did this film get me pregnant? I seriously hope not. But anyway, it turns out that her feeling kinda funky means she is pregnant and while she's in the doctor's office she feels sick so asks for a trashcan. Understandable if she felt she couldn't make it to the bathroom but I don't think that would matter considering she vomits bubbles. I have no way of commenting on that other than the doctor doesn't freak out and get her locked up for testing even though he admits it's not a normal thing to do. All I can say is that these two need a better doctor. Throughout her pregnancy, Tonya eats Silly String which I'm pretty sure contains a lot of chemicals that aren't safe for consumption, but she eats it on a cracker so I guess that's just fucking fine. They then go to a baby scene where the baby performs Cuban Pete for a few seconds along with Freak Out and 1) she doesn't even feel it. 2) She's not even looking at the screen at her baby. 3) Realistically she'd be dead or dying if that happened to her. I just...
Once all that's done with the worst of this...abomination of cinema are the fight scenes between the baby and the dog and the baby trying to make Tim insane because he saw that classic Warner Brothers cartoon with the frog singing vaudeville and thinks that that's where Tim belongs because it'll be fun to mess with him and explanations are only for the people who pay attention to films. The animation is scary. I can't lie. I won't lie. The animation on the baby looks cheap and like they had superimposed a man's face onto a CGI babies body and tried to make it look younger. The dog looks like he had a bit more of a budget but that doesn't help when apparently the animators know what Satan's pooch looks like and decided to bring his likeness to the big screen. Yeah, this thing is fucking scary. There's a scene where he's getting dragged through the kitchen or something I wasn't paying much attention to the surroundings considering I was pretty scared. As I said, though, the dogs getting dragged backwards and his eyes leave their sockets leaving black holes in their place. Have the eyes shoot out, by all means, that's what cartoons do but don't make the eyes leave their sockets. The eyes are the most expressive part of the face, once you take those away the face becomes mostly expressionless and any expression that is conveyed may come across as something else. I don't know what it came across as here, I was too busy pissing myself in fear.
There's even a scene where Tim is sick of having this thing torment him so he puts it in its car seat and gets in the car. He says to the baby Quote: "First, I'm gonna take you to a paediatrician, then I'm taking you to an exorcist." THEN THE BABY SPINS HIS HEAD AND VOMITS ILLUMINOUS GREEN SHIT!! WHAT KID IS EVEN GOING TO GET THAT REFERENCE?! Fuck me. The worst part about this bit? You hear bones cracking as this....thing's head is spinning. And it does it slower than in The Exorcist. At least in that Regan just spins and voms. Here no, they want to traumatise your kid, they do it slowly and you even see a slight struggle in this thing moving its head at first and I'm honestly just sitting here thinking...this shouldn't be in a kids film. It's like in the Alvin & The Chipmunks sequel...excuse me Squeakquel...(I hate that Grammarly corrected my spelling on that) that there was a Silence Of The Lambs reference. Are kids just getting into horror at a younger age nowadays while some grown adults find things like opposing opinions, males and pale skin colours offensive? Come for me SJW's, for I am dead inside, and this movie killed me.
After that, it's mostly just the fact that every single parent in this film is terrible at being parents. I'm not even joking. Odin (Bob Hoskins) doesn't listen to Loki. Loki only wants the baby who would technically be his son, to play with and not be a father to. Tim doesn't know how to look after the baby after almost glassing him during a night feed and insisting that Tonya takes the baby with her to New York on her business trip. And Tonya is probably the worst of them all. She didn't get up during the night feed, didn't think about the baby when Loki decides he's going to keep him, oh no, she's more interested in the fact that when Tim puts on the mask he's hot. I'm not even joking, she literally says Quote: "Honey, you look hot." At that point I had to pause the film and think about my life choices. I even thought about hers for a moment, has she gotten any good work after this? Did she see the premier of the film and think "fuck...nobodies going to hire me after that scene."
I know I've said in previous posts that it's good to scare children and that it's, in a way, necessary. Do not show them this. This is in a whole new world of scary, this doesn't ease your child into an uncomfortable atmosphere it just kinda starts off darkly lit and then Ben Steins face fucking comes off. It's horrific, do not show your kid this unless you think they can handle a true horror film.
I really wish I wanted to talk more about this but...I don't. This film hurt me in places I never thought I could be hurt. I have a headache from this film, I feel dizzy and sick after watching it. If you want to watch this then I'll give you some advice:
- Don't watch it in 3D. You'll be in enough pain in 2 dimensions, you don't need to add to your own suffering.
- Don't eat before watching. The editing, animation and just general shot direction in this will make you dizzy and sick. If you eat, you'll more than likely throw up like I did before I started writing this.
- Keep a lot of water near you. Because it's nice to stay hydrated and it may keep dizziness at bay, not by much but maybe enough
This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this film (and God bless you if you do) then go and support its creators by buying the DVD or Bluray.
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