Son of the Mask

See you in your dreams, kids.

Somebody stop me. No, genuinely. Please.

Halloween is upon us, and much like a certain two letter brand candy coated chocolate I'm very much in demand. Well, that and I also simply melt in a child's mouth. But sexual deviancies aside, I thought it a fitting occasion to review the most awful, horrifying and downright most disturbing movie I have ever seen. Welcome to Son of the Mask; a movie so unfit for human viewing it's a mystery how it ever got made in the first place.

Remember 1994? That was a good time, right? Everyone was listing to Oasis and playing their brand new PlayStation. Princess Diana and Kurt Cobain were still alive, and everyone was talking about the funniest movie they'd ever seen - The Mask.

Well, they were wrong then, and they're still wrong now. The Mask was shit. It was Jim Carrey being regular old dickhead Jim Carrey, except this time he looked like the Hulk's younger brother with Down's Syndrome and a hyperactivity disorder. I think this was the start of my burning desire to sedate Jim Carrey until his heart stops, and I can beat his smug looking corpse with a meat tenderiser until there is bone fragments in his dying bowel movement. What's that Jim? You're banging a playboy model? Shame she's crazier than a bag of Vietnam vets. Hey Jenny, maybe vaccines gave your son autism, or maybe it's because you let him wear ugg boots and crocs in public. Maybe it was the way you went through dicks and blow in the 90's like Ebola through an African child. I'm half surprised that, unlike that African child, your orifices don't just randomly start leaking blood and other viscous bodily fluids - some of which might even be yours.

But that's neither here nor there. The point is that The Mask was somehow a massive box-office hit and so they decided to strike while the iron's hot and pump out a sequel... eleven years later... with none of the original cast... and make it about a baby.

I'll be honest, I fear this movie. I fear it like Tony Abbott fears Elton John's Yacht parties.

The film opens with Loki (played by the sexually ambiguous Alan Cumming, not the sexually ambiguous Tom Hiddleston) attempting to steal the mask from the Edge City museum, only to find that it's actually a fake. Then he pulls Ben Stein's face off. Like, off. No shit. What the fuck, movie? We then see the real mask wash ashore of the river in the not-so-nearby Fringe City, where it is retrieved by a dog and bought home to the stars of this film - Jamie Kennedy (as Tim) and that lesbian from Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place (as Tonya). So Tim is going to his boss' Halloween party but his costume got ruined, so he decides to take the mask his dog found and wear that. Can you guess what happens next? That's right, a completely unnecessary, overacted, obnoxious and overly long song and dance number where Tim (looking like a caricature of Conan O'Brien wearing an avocado face mask) proceeds to butcher Frankie Valli's "I Love You Baby" in 5 different, but no less terrible, musical styles. After the party Mask Tim decides to go home and plow his ridiculously hot wife and BOOM! Baby time.

Nine months later and the little bundle of shit is born and wouldn't you know it, he has 'mask powers', which appear to be predominantly inflating your own head and pulling weapons out of your arse. So then the baby tries to get Tim send to a mental hospital, and then tries to kill the dog, and then saves his dad from Loki who is trying to kill him and steal the mask and the baby. If any of that confused you, don't worry. The story is really not an important part of this movie.

The CGI is bad. I mean, super bad. For 2005 it looks unimaginably dumb. Remember when the unfinished copy of X-Men Origins leaked and it was hilarious because half the effects were unfinished and it looked like someone had spliced in a bunch of polaroids of Lego as a stop motion effect? Well, that was better than this fucking movie's CGI. And it's all utterly terrifying. Why does the baby inflate its own head like a balloon? Why does Mask Tim wear red lipstick? What the fuck does Loki turn into near the end? Some sort of paedophile's Swiss army knife/totem pole? What the fuck movie? Just, what the fuck? 1982's The Thing wasn't this nightmare inducing.

And now on to Jamie Kennedy. He is, as  always, about as funny as a room full of terminally ill children. Actually, considerably less so because I never once laughed at Jamie Kennedy when I thought about him. Here is a list of things funnier than Jamie Kennedy:

Literally anything.

That's kind of cheating, so I'll do another one:

Cross-eyed breast implants? Funnier.

Poverty? Funnier.

Crippling student debt? Funnier.

3rd world living conditions? Way funnier.

The holocaust? Yep, funnier.

The backfire from offensive drawings of the Prophet Muhammad? About as funny.

Anyway, the movie sucks, its horrifying imagery will mentally scar you for life, and your children are better of watching a snuff film in the long run. At least that would be a nice little segue into having a talk about why grandma doesn't come over for Christmas anymore.

Happy Halloween, kiddies. If you come trick or treating at my house this year and you can guess my costume then you'll get all the candy you can eat.

Hint: This year I'm Roman Polanksi.

$5 a Day

Time.

Larry King has a cameo as Sharon Stone's stunt double.

Time is a menstruating woman - it cannot be stopped or reasoned with. All you can do is try to stay out of its way as it slowly devours the joy and life from your withering husk, and hope that it doesn't leave too much blood on the carpet.

This is to say that time is cruel. Just look what it did to Sharon Stone. Remember when everyone would watch Basic Instinct for that one shot of her fajita, even though it looked like a photo of Robin Williams getting open heart surgery? Now it probably looks like that Tauntaun scene in Empire Strikes Back. You know the one I'm talking about.

Anyway, Basic Instinct was a shit movie. It's basically a sixty-something minutes of B grade erotic thriller book-ending the world's shortest and least exciting porno. Sharon Stone's vagina is looking worse for wear these days. Ever see the movie 127 Hours with James Franco? Believe it or not but that movie was filmed entirely on location inside Sharon Stone's massive gaper. Franco was quoted as saying "Had I actually been stuck inside (Sharon's) vagina, I would have chewed through my own arm in 127 seconds, let alone hours."

Not really, but... I mean... probably, you know? I wouldn't blame him if he had. I'd rather get polio than see her naked.

I should probably talk about the actual movie I'm reviewing now. It's fucking garbage. The whole premise is a middle aged man going on a road trip with his father in a salmon pink PT Cruiser with Sweet'n Low brand sweetener decals. They don't even have a mixed tape for the drive, amateurs. It stars Christopher Walken, the brother from Face/Off, Dean Cain and Sharon Stone - looking like she's spent the last 15 years preparing for the role of Skeletor in a Guillermo del Toro remake of Masters of the Universe.

$5 a Day is a movie about being stuck somewhere you don't want to be, and they capture that sensation pretty well. I immediately didn't want to be there watching it. The story goes that Walken (Nat), an old conman, tells his son (Ritchie) that he's sick and dying, and that he needs him to drive his old arse to New Mexico for a cure. They manage to eat along the way by using fake IDs to get free birthday meals at IHOPs. They end up in New Mexico to collect money from an old business partner of Nat's, and Ritchie ends up finding out that not only is Nat not sick, he isn't even his real dad - which makes all those bath-times a little suspicious. Ritchie runs off with the money but does some soul searching and goes back to Nat, who then decides to collapse and get actually sick. Then Ritchie and his ex-girlfriend sneak Nat out of hospital so he can go skinny dipping, and then die. Awesome job, guys. A very unsatisfying end to a very unfulfilling movie about people I genuinely don't care about. Who wrote this thing? A husband and wife couple that have written nothing but subpar TV movies since 1994. Seems about right.

If you were to offer me the choice of watching this movie again or being injected with all the vaccines, then austism me up, Scotty, because it's a far less cruel fate than 98 minutes of this testament to mundanity.

Christopher Walken hams his performance up big time - even by Christopher Walken standards - and looks like he was dressed entirely by thrift store donations from the 1970's. And then his hair... Is it even real? It looks like a helmet in the shape of a wig designed by the architect who did Pangu Plaza. And... is he paying those hairdressers in Phone cards and coupons? Yes. Yes he is. Somehow I get the idea that he does this in real life too, because he seems genuinely bat-shit crazy. And don't even get me started again on Sharon Stone. She's the third least convincing woman in the Hollywood, behind Madonna and Bruce Jenner.

All in all, an utter waste of an hour and forty minutes that could have been better spent volunteering or spending time with the underprivileged (read: anyone who isn't a white male).