Guilty Parties Involved: New Line “Oh crap we’re out of Hobbit movies” Cinema, Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, 64 thousand bad CGI shots and some other poor souls. Directed by Lawrence Guterman, who also brought us 2001’s “Cats and Dogs”.

Fun-Crap Rating: 8 out of 10

2005 / 94 Minutes / PG
Reviewed by Ben Heckendorn

Not-so-terrible part: I didn’t go blind watching it.

Really terrible part: While getting its diaper changed “Mask Baby” pees in 6 different directions, most of them landing on Jamie Kennedy, then shoots him in the face with a firehouse-strength blast of urine. Also the Clint Eastwood parody bit is inexcusable (Lawrence Gutenburg should be Unforgiven for it).

Memorable line: “WHERE’S MY MAAAAAASKKKK???” screams Loki (Alan Cumming) as he whirls around a museum. Truly awful.

I wasn’t there when this movie was greenlit but it must have gone something like this:

New Line Executive 1
“Hey, didn’t ‘The Mask’ make a lot of money 10 years ago?”

Executive 2
“Yeah, like $120 million. It was pretty cheap to make too, I think we only spent like $25 mil on it.”

Executive 1
“Wow that buys a lot of coke! The Mask franchise is red-hot! We should whip out another one!”

Executive 2
“Jim Carrey won’t do it - even after I told him not to worry, the script is just as bad as ‘The Grinch’”

Executive 1
“We’ll show that loser! Let’s go ahead and make a Mask movie without him and watch as he cries all the way to the unemployment line!”

Executive 2
“Sounds good but somebody’s gotta be in it.”

Executive 1
“What about Jamie Kennedy? He’s cheap! That way we can spend more on shitty special effects.”

Executive 2
“Ok but he has to have a baby in it - you know, to get the female crowd - and the baby has to have Mask powers.”

Executive 1
“I know! ‘Son of the Mask’!”

Executive 2
“Brilliant! Let’s spend $100 million on this turd and tell our shareholders it’s the ‘next Lord of the Rings’”

That’s the only way I can imagine this piece of shit getting made because it’s probably the lamest most uncalled for sequel since “Mimic 3″ However it’s also so incredibly bad it makes for a great Shitty Movie Night T

The plot. oh God help us. Jamie Kennedy plays this aspiring animator (If he wants to be an animator so bad why doesn’t he move to India?) with a baby-wanting wife who comes off as a desperately poor man’s Renee Zellweger. His dog named Otis (the dog in the original was Milo, ha ha ha) finds the Mask and Kennedy puts it on for a Halloween party. (First rule of shitty movies: Have a masquerade ball scene. It’s sad how true this is) A long really really so-bad-you’ll-think-you’re-in-hell lame-ass musical number at the party ensues led by Mask-enabled Kennedy and he then goes home (still as Mask-man) and jumps in bed with his wife. Do the math cause we can’t show the kids in the audience what happens.

The next day his wife announces she’s pregnant! (Yes, the VERY NEXT DAY) We then get a montage of the next 9 months, complete with an ultrasound of the “mask baby” bouncing around inside the womb and playing cha-cha’s - you really have to see this shit to believe it. Meanwhile his “Mask antics” at the party get Kennedy a promotion at his workplace but he can’t find the Mask!

Why not? Well because the dog has it! Once the baby gets born the dog becomes jealous and decides to use the Mask to get rid of the kid. We then get this completely lame sequence of the dog diagramming what he’s going to do to the kid a la Wile E. Coyote and a really bad sequence of the kid using his “mask powers” (that he was born with) to stop him. So Kennedy only wears the Mask I think twice in this piece of shit, the rest of the time it’s on the dog as he fights the kid. There’s also this whole “fatherhood” crap going on with Kennedy being awaken at all hours of the night to feed the baby. He does this as if he’s sleepwalking, at one point almost feeding the baby a small lamp with a broken bulb instead of a bottle. Really. Strangely enough the baby crying never wakes up his mom during these scenes, apparently because she wouldn’t be dumb enough to feed it a lamp and therefore it wouldn’t be “funny”.

If this sounds too awful to be true, well, believe me it’s real because I lived to tell the tale. Barely. Along the way Loki (Alan Cummings) shows up to get his mask back because his god-dad (Sigh. Bob Hoskins) is bitching at him to get it. Loki rides around in a car with license plates that read “LOW KEY” (shoot me now) and checking out all newborn babies to see which is “the one”. This plays like a cross between “The Ten Commandments” and “The Terminator” except written by a coked-up moron. For example, Loki sucks babies’ moms into vacuum cleaners so he can examine the kids. Yes that sucks all right.

Eventually Loki kidnaps Kennedy’s mask-baby and decides to adopt him (since he can piss in 6 directions and such) Kennedy must then don “The Mask” and get his son back via a completely stupid “showdown” with Loki complete with giant hammers, hand grenades (also giant) and anvils (again, giant). All this stuff is obviously supposed to be an homage to classic Warner Bros cartoons (they’re even extremely long segments of those classic cartoons in this film as the baby watches them on TV to learn “tricks”) but it’s so badly done you could literally hook electromagnets up to Chuck Jones’ corpse and power all of California as he spins in his grave.

I’m not a good enough writer to even come close to describing how bad this film is, complete with its “The END??” ending of having the mom become pregnant again. (”Daughter of the Mask?”) But it IS so horribly bad that it makes a great Shitty Movie Night title, even if Jones’ wife begged us to turn it off about halfway in. (A first!) In fact, it’s probably the worst and most offensively bad big-budget movie I have ever seen, even crappier than The Grinch or Batman & Robin. If you watch it to laugh at the badness you won’t be disappointed, but be warned - it’ll take strength!

Suggested Number of Beers for watching film: 8 per person

Drinking game: Take a drink every time:

1) A full-screen clip of an old Warner Bros cartoon plays.
2) The baby dances.
3) The baby cries and annoys Kennedy.
4) Someone farts.
5) Loki’s outfit changes.
6) Bob Hoskins screams LOOOOKKKIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!
7) Jamie Kennedy is a moron.
The masked-dog snickers and looks at the camera.
9) Bodily fluid flies through the air.
10) You want to tear your own eyeballs out.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Ben's Picks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.