The Mask (1994)

Director: Chuck Russell

Cast: Jim Carrey, Peter Riegert, Peter Greene, Cameron Diaz

Have I Seen It Before: You don’t have your tenth birthday in 1994 and somehow avoid the film. This is going to seem like a strange idea, but it was only after re-watching it recently that it dawned on me just how much I must have watched this one back in the day. Individual moments--even including slight instances of behavior—tweaked a memory.

Did I Like It: And yet it’s been years, probably even decades since the last time I watched the film. Why? I think I made the decision at some point that of all of Carrey’s films in the first decade or so of his bona fide movie stardom, it wasn’t nearly as funny (even in an adolescent way) as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)*, or Dumb and Dumber (1995).

But there’s more to the film than that, at least nominally, as the last half hour of the film is so standard I think I suddenly remembered why I got to a point where I found the film underwhelming. If you can get over the fact that CGI ages  worse than new-off-the-lot cars, there’s an impressively credible quality of a cartoon come to life in Carrey’s performance, made all the more impressive by the handful of shots where he had to stop moving around for the pyrotechnics around him to work properly. All of the highlights of his career, especially the early years, might make one think that he was going through prolonged manic episodes barely captured by film, but it’s hard to ignore here that Carrey is a more finely-tuned machine than he generally gets credit.

I was also oddly charmed by the plot of the movie of all things. It might be an obvious change to have the spunky reporter (Amy Yasbeck) be the morally bankrupt betrayer, and the vamp (Diaz) has the heart of gold. On the topic of Diaz, Carrey might have to take a bit of a backseat to his leading lady, as she enters filmdom here with more charisma (and I do mean charisma) than reels of ogling could ever hope to obscure. There were probably any number of attractive actresses who could have been cast in the role, but few would have been able to make a career out of it.

*And I’m not sure anyone—regardless of what they feel about the modern world—can watch Ace Ventura and not feel a little weirdly nauseous about the whole prospect.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Director: Chuck Russell

Cast: Heather Langenkamp, Patricia Arquette, Larry Fishburne, Robert Englund

Have I Seen it Before: Yes? As the Nightmare movies are not really my go-to slasher series, I get a little bit fuzzy outside of <the original>, <Freddy’s Revenge (1985)>, and <Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)>.

Did I Like It: My uncertainty only grows when I realize that this film certainly does distinguish itself in the series. The effects work is sufficiently gross (and I mean that in the best way) with the the worm creature Freddy takes the form of early in the film is easily memorable.

I’m always a little bit suspicious of long-running horror series becoming transfixed on their own mythologies as a replacement for building actual tension. It had frequently threatened to kill the Halloween series, it essentially did slowly eradicate Hellraiser, and for my money, Jason Voorhees never had anything to lose under the weight of too much backstory. Here, there was always a mythic quality to Freddy, and while New Nightmare may have tapped into that quality with more confidence and resonance, the little bit of additional backstory we get about Freddy here manages to not be too much. And, besides, “the bastard son of 100 maniacs” is the kind of pulpy fun that makes one glad they are alive to take in such fluff.

Most importantly, though, this film exists ahead of its time. Almost every recent new entry in long-running horror series has an underlying theme of protagonists taking power back from their tormentors, but the story of the titular dream warriors here is a precursor to that trend, made all the more strange by the fact that it exists at a time where the slasher genre was content to be nothing more artistic than the local butcher, forming their cuts out of the caucuses of people in their mid-twenties desperate to pretend they are teenagers.