Masked Mutilator is another one of
those incomplete movies ala The Other
Side of the Wind or Gone with the
Pope where recent efforts were made to take the surviving footage in the
film cans from years prior and bring the picture towards some semblance of
completion. In the case of Masked Mutilator, an early combination
of wrestling and the horror film featuring real professional wrestlers in the
cast, the film began production on and off in 1994 as a 16mm project which was
shut down, resurrected once more in 1996 before being abandoned with some elements
being lost to time entirely.
Circa
2019, some twenty-five years later, Severin Films and their subsidiary Intervision
reunited with one of the film’s original stars and using new narrative bookends
involving a modern day crime podcast have brought the unfinished wrestling
horror film to the finish line. The
question at the end of all this effort is whether or not this proto
wrestling-horror movie will live up to expectations of fans of this cobbled
together genre hybrid or whether or not the dailies should have been left in
the cans.
Directed
by and starring Brick Bronsky (billed as Jeff Beltzner), the film flashes back
to an infamous wrestling match featuring wrestler Vic (Jeff Sibbach) named the Masked Mutilator which left his opponent
dead in the ring. Years later, we find
Vic working in a group home for juvenile delinquents, made up of the cannon
fodder characters usually gathered together for a slasher horror flick. Soon someone donning a wrestling mask begins
murdering the residents of the group home with all suspicions pointing at
Vic.
Despite
being billed as a wrestling horror movie, there’s not a whole lot in the way of
the sports entertainment profession on display in this. Save for the opening homicidal wrestling
match, the film mostly serves up cool deaths and dismemberment of the
wrestlers-turned-actors outside of the ring.
While we get some recognizable choke holds, body slams and some wild
roundhouse kicks, actual wrestling as a horror element is rarely explored
here. The cast of character actors are a bit rusty but as such are secondary to the beefed up wrestlers in the cast. Mostly this plays like Friday the 13th if Jason
Voorhees wrestled on occasion.
Given
the nature of this production, picture quality varies significantly in between
shots with some newly shot scenes in crisp high-definition, gritty 16mm and
even grittier surviving VHS footage of lost 16mm elements, Masked Mutilator is a bit of a smorgasbord visually. The 16mm footage itself, while relatively
well photographed by Scott Barkman, was clearly designed for fullscreen
presentation before being cropped and reframed to conform with the newly shot
footage, resulting in some awkward clipping and unnaturally tight headroom.
Sonically,
much of what’s on the soundtrack consists of production audio which sounds
mostly crisp but grows raspy and scratchy at other times with only the film’s
newly rendered electronic soundtrack by Fabrizio Bondi sounding modern. For the most part it sounds fine but by now
if you’ve read this far, you should go into this knowing this production isn’t
going to look or sound the best. That said, the footage and audio is in far better shape than, say, the moldy prints used to make the Massacre Video release of The Devil.
An
odd duck in the horror subgenre with even stranger loose connections to the
wrestling profession, Masked Mutilator is
not a particularly good movie but as such remains for fans of horror and wrestling
a curious hybrid we’re unlikely to see manifest itself again anytime soon. Its also very short, just barely running over seventy minutes. Fans of old-school independent VHS or 16mm
horror will find much to enjoy here while those looking to be scared or
thrilled will likely come away bored and underwhelmed. As for myself I enjoyed it but present this
review as a warning to temper your expectations if you feel like trying this
pair of bloodied wrestling boots on.
--Andrew Kotwicki
