Apr 2, 2024
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Masked Mutilator (Beltzner, 2019)
Masked Mutilator (Beltzner, 2019)
Acting! (Part III)
Masked Mutilator (Beltzner, 2019)
Acting! (Part II)
Masked Mutilator (Beltzner, 2019)
Acting! (Part I)
Masked Mutilator (Beltzner, 2019)
Masked Mutilator (Beltzner, 2019)
Movie Review | Masked Mutilator (Beltzner, 2019)
Years after a professional wrestler known as the Masked Mutilator kills an opponent in the ring, he takes a job supervising a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. After a burly new intern shows up to shape the joint up with his college know-how, the residents start getting murdered one at a time by a masked killer, using wrestling moves no less. (Surprisingly he doesn’t mutilate his victims, at least while they’re alive - he dismembers one to dispose of the body. Probably the worst case of false advertising since The Neverending Story.) Who is this mysterious masked...uh, not mutilator? How much wrestling do we have to endure until we find out? Do any of the juvenile delinquents look like actual teenagers? And is this really a tract on the broken support system for offenders and the perils of gutting the welfare state? I won’t say, a decent amount, no, and despite the presence of the American flag in a few scenes, hell no. The actors aren’t exactly “good”, and most of the dudes look like stunt doubles for the cast of Animal House, but there’s a girl who resembles Elizabeth Kaitan and tries to jump all the guys’ bones, so I guess she’s my favourite character. She also has a scene where she taunts another girl for her sexual inexperience and then pivots to genuine concern for a different character’s disappearance, so she’s a woman of many layers. That character looks like Chuck Schuldiner and like Schuldiner is into metal, but unlike Schuldiner is super lame and a total dick.
There’s also a new guy who’s actually pretty nice and handy with nunchuks, who eventually faces off with two characters played by real professional wrestlers, one of whom channels Eric Freeman of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 in his performance. (Is that a spoiler? Who’s to say?) I’m not a big wrestling fan (I stopped watching at the age of 8 after seeing the Dudley Boyz break a table over a septuagenarian opponent’s back), but despite all the furniture having been conveniently moved out of the path of the fighting, those scenes are actually halfway entertaining. The kills are also less amateurish than I expected, although having the characters spit out fake blood in place of actual gore seems like a product of the meager budget. The story behind the movie is probably more interesting than the finished product (a 16mm-shot no-budgeter started in 1994 that briefly resumed production 2 years later and then sat in the producer’s basement for over 2 decades until it was completed with some present-day bookends that reframed the original footage as flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks!), but the whole thing is made with enough effort and enthusiasm and effort to remain fairly watchable.