Skull: The Mask, 2020.
Directed by Armando Fonseca and Kapel Furman.
Starring Natallia Rodrigues, Tristan Aronovich, Guta Ruiz, and Eduardo Semerjian.
SYNOPSIS:
In the year 1944, an artefact is used in a military experiment. The artefact is the Mask of Anhangá, the executioner of Tahawantinsupay, a pre-Columbian god. Today, the mask arrives in São Paulo, possessing a body and starting to commit visceral sacrifices in the name of its god.
As appealing as a São Paulo-set, Brazilian riff on Friday the 13th might sound on paper, it’s a proposition which arrives with a shed-load of caveats in Armando Fonseca and Kapel Furman’s Skull: The Mask, a movie with enticing bones, but too little in the way of compelling guts.
As an opening film reel reveals, in 1944 the Nazis discovered a South American artefact – the Mask of Anhangá, who served as the executioner of a pre-Columbian god – which they subsequently used in a failed military experiment to try and defeat the Allies.
In the present day, the mask resurfaces in São Paulo, where it ends up possessing an unsuspecting victim, allowing the mask to wreak havoc across the city, committing wanton murder as it spills blood to satiate its god, Tahawantinsupay. This is all while troubled policewoman Beatriz Obdias (Natallia Rodrigues) attempts to solve the spate of grisly murders.
Easily the biggest surprise about this movie is that, despite such a nutso premise, it mostly plays things shockingly straight. For all of its head-exploding violence and splashy style, there’s little nodding to the audience at all, even as, with its hulking, masked, invulnerable, machete-wielding antagonist, it offers up a relatively transparent homage to the Friday the 13th series.
After the introductory film reel plays out, it’s quite a wait before the terror ramps up again, which immediately foregrounds the film’s biggest problem; it actually believes its tropey plot is something more than window dressing for the over-the-top kills.
Far, far too much of the movie is focused on Beatriz’s staggeringly dull breadcrumb-following narrative, no matter how well Natallia Rodrigues plays the part. Bafflingly, Beatriz gets far more of a focus than Anhangá, awash in tired, drug-taking cop cliches as she is.
Additional subplots are quickly introduced which only further keep audiences at arm’s length from the slasher movie elements; there are two other parties trying to get the mask for themselves – one benevolent, the other not – each with deeply expository, laboured reasons for doing so. Though most of the distended chatter is at least acted with conviction, there’s only so many times one can watch someone leer over a laptop or soak in a robotic lore dump before interest begins to wane.
It’s a shame, because when the movie works, it really works. Counter to these joyless asides, the sequences featuring the mask are genuinely fun to behold. Its introductory sequence is playfully shot from a first-person perspective, and the practical effects employed to show it attacking its first victims are genuinely creative.
But these moments of invention are just too few and far between; there’s perhaps 15-or-so minutes of quality gory action throughout, drowned beneath layers of procedural languor. Watching Anhangá dismantle human bodies remains enticing for the entirety, as do some of the more ambitious visual effects and production design elements, but these ideas – especially a weapon I can best describe as a machete on an intestinal leash – are invoked too infrequently to fully satisfy.
The neat Brazilian locale sets it apart from a glut of similarly-minded U.S.-set romps, but again, the gonzo-camp potential feels oddly muted, with a surprisingly serious-minded tack and, most misguidedly, far too much of an actual attempt at a plot.
The kernels of fun are self-evident, but Skull: The Mask too often suffocates the good stuff amid a slew of tedious subplots. And in the tradition of the genre, it of course sets up a sequel before the end credits roll – or before anyone asked it to.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
