Unmasked Part 25 (1989)

It's Friday the 13th! But I guess you all know this. I never reviewed a Friday the 13th movie on this day, never - but I always want to, because I love that franchise. Yeah, I know, it represents the cheapest and most shallow of all horror-series, but it still works after all these years. I even like the latest sequel/remake, I think Jason goes to Hell is fantastic and I love the Vs movie. My favourites is part 2 and 4, but the first one is a slasher-masterpiece. But everyone else is writing reviews about good old Jason, so I have to do something different. First I was trying to get my hands on some of the fan movies that's been made over the years, but no luck there. Then something reminded me of one of the first DVDs I ever bought, Unmasked Part 25, a British deconstruction of the slasher-genre, especially the Jason-movies!

Jackson (Gregory Cox) is bored with life. So he has left his old hunting-grounds, a camp in the US where he roamed the forests like a wild animal after his mother died. He's tired of killing camp counsellors. So he goes back to London where his father still lives, but it's hard to stop killing. After slaughtering a whole house of partying trendy British youths he meets a blind woman, Shelly (Fiona Evans) and she's so kind and nice the he decides not to kill her. They start dating and she loves him even if he has a deformed face and prefer wearing a hockey mask outside the house. But the almost automatic lust for killing won't stop and Jackson is torn between living a normal life and killing stupid partying kids...

Unmasked Part 25 was directed by the mysterious Swedish director Anders Palm, who I've been trying to find for an interview for may years now. He also directed another interesting movie that I haven't been able to locate, Murder on Line One (also from 1989) and seems to have moved to Canada, at least for a while. According to the IMDB he was involved in Swedish documentary a few years ago, but it can be another Anders Palm - it's not a rare name in Sweden. Anyway, Unmasked Part 25 is an interesting try to deconstruct the slasher-genre with telling it from another point of view but with the same clichés. Similar things have been done lately with Tuck and Dale vs Evil, The Last Lovecraft, Cabin in the Woods and so on.

What's a bit sad is that it only partly works. The beginning, the set-up to the romance is excellent and brings some spectacular and gory death scenes, which promises a smart twist on the legend of Jason Voorhees, but soon it stumbles on it's own ambitious and slows down and yeah, enters the world of pretentiousness. It picks up at the end again, with some gory murders and the depression of Jackson when he knows exactly what's his victims is gonna do when they see him. It's not fun with murders anymore. The final image is very ironic, a man trapped in his own destiny - and here we ask us the questions if he's a real person or a character who managed to escape from the world of movies.

It's an odd movie, very arty outside the murder scenes and with thick British accents both making it fresh and hard to understand at the same time. It delivers on the gore-front anyway with cool deaths and graphic violence. Lots of blood and often lingering a bit too long on the victims, which makes me surprised that the BBFC didn't cut anything from this UK DVD.

It's not a bad movie, but in the end suffers from being a bit too anxious of not being taking seriously and therefore added a bit too much student film melodrama.