If you have eyes and ears, Halloween: The Truth Behind the Mask is not for you.
Two stoner bros wearing Baja hoodies walk around in a forest, sleep on piles of dirt, and eventually mug someone. One of them looks at a case that they’ve stolen, which is obviously a guitar case. The first guy says, “Let’s see what we got, man!” They open the case. The other guy says, “Oh wow, it’s a guitar!”
Twenty minutes down.
For the remaining 92 minutes, we watch these guys break into someone’s house and play Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” on the instruments they find in the basement. Then they use binoculars to spy on sunbathing women, which is actually real-life hidden camera close-ups of boobs, asses, and crotches at the beach. And actually gross. Two other random dudes snort a behemoth bag of coke, shoot heroin, and watch Sanford and Son. After 45 minutes, Michael Myers shows up. He can teleport. Michael can also be stopped by a kick to the penis, but we never find out the truth behind his mask. Probably because we spent so much time watching a guy dunk a basketball.
Vintage fan films are inherently arresting. From The Green Goblin’s Last Stand to Friday the 13th Part X: To Hell and Back, it’s fun to see flesh-and-blood bootlegs of iconic characters filtered through the magical prism of your next door neighbor’s camcorder. The combination of passion and delusion that goes into the creation of these movies is exactly why they feel so electric. And addicting. I mean, yes, OF COURSE I want to see Leatherface barf on Jason in The Resurrection of Michael Myers Part 2. But not every shot-on-video fan film can be a funhouse slide to a new cosmic plane.
Halloween: The Truth Behind the Mask is what might have happened if Beavis and Butthead made Easy Rider instead of Dennis Hopper. As great as that sounds on paper, the reality is much more grim. Possibly shot in Pittsburgh (thanks to a Pittsburgh Steelers poster on the wall), Halloween is an anti-movie about people sitting on couches, walking through forests, and getting high. Outside of one elaborate gore scene involving Michael Myers’s fingers thrusting through someone’s skull, nothing notable happens. Everything takes forever. Instead of enhancing the mood, the fourth-generation VHS crust makes watching more difficult — we can’t see anything, especially when there’s nothing to see. And like a rotten cherry on top, some dude shows up wearing a Social Distortion jean jacket. Total bummer.
The most fun I had during Halloween: The Truth Behind the Mask was when I used SoundHound to discover “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative. Reading the song’s YouTube comments were five-thousand times more entertaining than watching this movie.
