Classic Horrors Club

Unmasked Part 25 (1988) opens as a typical 80s slasher film might and, based on the special effects, a pretty good one. A hockey-masked killer executes (pun intended) five kills:

• He runs up behind a man then proceeds to peel off his face and plunge his hand into his chest, holding his beating heart in his hand.
• He flattens a man’s face with a shovel and a blood splatter lands on an exposed lightbulb causing it to explode.
• He strangles a woman with some kind of wire the slices her neck open.
• He skewers a couple standing and having sex against the wall.
• He breaks the lightbulb off the end of a lamp and shoves it into a woman’s mouth.

The movie then almost comes to a complete halt, just as the killer does when he’s about to stab a blind woman. She mistakes him for her date and is kind to him, causing him to pause. He drops his knife and goes home with her. They make a true connection, and she encourages him to remove his mask. He hates wearing it, but without it, people think he’s a monster. It’s no wonder, his face is a swollen, misshapen, mass of flesh with one good eye and one that rests lower on his cheek. She can’t see it, but she can feel it, and she doesn’t care.

As Shelly (Fiona Evans) brings Jackson (Gregory Cox) out of his shell, he shares with her that as a child, he was thought to have drowned at a summer camp. Wait a minute… what’s happening here? Jackson sounds a lot like Jason, especially when she compares him to a character in a film, The Hand of Death, and he replies, “Don’t you understand? I am that guy from the movies!” Again, she doesn’t care, and purchases a hockey mask so the two of them can walk together hand-in-hand in the park, with her sharing some of his regular ridicule.

So, yes, Unmasked Part 25 is a meta-comedy that pretends Jackson/Jason is a real person and a series of movies has been made about him. The concept provides for some clever laughs but doesn’t quite fire on all cylinders. It runs 85 minutes, which isn’t too long in full, but some scenes in the middle are talky and seem to last forever. If it were a little tighter, it would give other slasher spoofs of the 80s a run for their money, especially with the extra meta layer.

Bookending the film is another series of kills. My favorite scene is when he faces a woman in the woods and says:

Go ahead, scream if you’d like. To be perfectly honest, I’m really starting to get quite bored with this whole thing. Ridiculous isn’t it? I mean, I have to kill, I have no choice in the matter, but you think they’d let me try something else as well. I do have other talents as well. There’s no sense in you trying to run for it, really. You’ll get ten feet, and run into a branch, or stumble over a root.

Of course, she runs… and then trips and falls. Jackson says, “See! What did I tell you?” before plunging his pitchfork into her abdomen. This scene adds another entire level. Jackson, who is the character of a horror film franchise, is being written to behave the way he does… so that he is the character of the movie. The circle of life, perhaps? The thought is sublime, but it’s tough for any parody to be as consistently clever throughout. If Unmasked Part 25 were, it would be a bona fide classic.