Despite looking like Vicky Pollard from Little Britain, Mary (Nicole Katherine Riddell) finds herself hired as a fluffer on a low budget porn shoot. Unfortunately, one of the props being used on a XXX parody of Tarzan is a wooden African mask that transforms the wearer into a vicious demonic killer.
The first half of this film is played as an offbeat comedy with dark humour, but it isn't funny, even though the irritatingly quirky soundtrack does its best to convince the viewer otherwise. A porn-shoot premise offers plenty of scope for lewd gags and general outrageousness, but this film somehow takes the world of low-rent sex flicks, with its many sleazy characters, and makes it boring.
The second half of the movie is more focused on the horror, but with lousy acting, subpar gore, way too many cheap and nasty visual effects, and scene transitions that look like something out of a Powerpoint presentation, the whole thing is too simply too shoddy to be scary.
Given how many producers, co-producers, executive producers and associate producers are listed in the credits on IMDb, I'm guessing that the film was crowd-funded, which is why I'll never stump up cash to help kickstart a film: I don't want to risk having my name forever associated with something this bad.
N. B. An early scene, in which antiques shop assistant Todd sells the mask to the prop hunter against his boss's wishes, seems inspired by the opening scene of Gremlins. Later in the film, porn talent Otto tears flesh off his face, dropping bloody chunks into a sink, in a scene reminiscent of Poltergeist. Sadly, Richard Rowntree, producer/writer/director of Mask of the Devil, is no Spielberg, Dante or Hooper.
