Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon Reviews

Producer, director and cowriter Scott Glosserman's postmodern spin on psycho-killer movie cliches is clever, no two ways about it. Perhaps too clever for its own good: in the end his mockumetary chronicle of an anonymous psycho-worshipper's campaign to become America's Next Top Bogeyman lacks the bitter resonance of its obvious predecessor, Belgian filmmaker Remy Belvaux's 1992 MAN BITES DOG/C'EST ARRIVE PRES DE CHEZ VOUS. Aspiring documentary filmmaker Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals) just may have found the hot topic that will make her a name: Small-town everyman Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel) has agreed to let her film the events leading up to his bid to put Glen Echo on the map as the town that spawned a supernatural slasher on par with Jason Voorhees, Chuckie, Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. Taylor and her two-man crew, Todd (Britain Spellings) and Doug (Ben Pace), follow Leslie as he picks his primary victim, wholesome waitress Kelly (Kate Lang Johnson), then orchestrates the events that will lure her and her friends to Vernon Farm, a local ruin haunted by legends of grotesque child abuse and retaliatory slaughter. ("It's so sadistic, and yet genius," muses Taylor as Leslie carefully plants fake news reports tainting Kelly's family with the horrors at Vernon Farm.) He then prepares the crime-scene-to-be so he can kill them in accordance with the conventions laid out in films like FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), HALLOWEEN (1978) and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984), and consults with his mentor, pioneering serial killer Eugene (IN COLD BLOOD's Scott Wilson), now retired and living with his favorite final girl (Bridgett Newton). Leslie even fortuitously acquires an "Ahab" in Doc Halloran (Robert Englund), a vaguely compromised lone wolf who's onto the killer and, for complicated personal reasons, determined to stop him. The trouble, of course, is that Taylor has a conscience, and as the time comes for Leslie to put his plan into practice, she begins (rather belatedly) to entertain serious doubts about the morality of standing by and filming while people die screaming. Glosserman and cowriter/producer David J. Stieve know their scary movies, soup to psychosexual-symbolic nuts. But in the end they never get below the surface to the really scary stuff, but they stage one hell of a cliched yet thoroughly effective kicker ending, all to the tune of the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer, Qu'est Que C'est?" Don't bail when the credits start to roll or you'll miss it.