Maskhead (2009) User Reviews

This ain't Pinhead...

[celtcub · 3/10 · 17 November 2010]

Honestly watching this film I could see how it was made. The guys wanted to top the other films they had done, so they got a cast of actors willing to do softcore porn shots, wrote a flimsy storyline to support the gore and then Google'd several sexual fetishes to make the film even edgier. I will give them props for putting guys through the paces as well as girls. Honestly seeing men in these situations is far more interesting to me and there are so few films that even include them. However, it's still only a couple of scenes. The movie itself (minus the male skin) isn't really worth watching. The effects are passable (especially if you thought August underground was decent)and the acting is about what you'd expect from Toe Tag (which is to say a bunch of foul mouth Southern Good-Ole-Boys and Trailer Park Chicks).

There are other and better gore films out there. This one is only for Toe Tag fans. And I think it's pretty clear that any rating over a 4 is from someone who was on set or sleeping with a cast member...

again disturbing

[trashgang · 4/10 · 16 December 2009]

You can see that Fred Vogel made some step forward. There is a storyline in this new effort. But sometimes it's a bit of too much blah blah. And that's a shame. It's funny how we see two girls making adds for an SM porn movie but in fact they only have some snuff in their mind. While performing their act suddenly the maskhead pops in only to deliver the actors suffering, pain, torture and death. Of course knowing Fred that's what the movie in fact is all about, the gore surrounding the snuff shots. It starts well with his famous hammer scenes. And the scene with the torturing of the gay is also big fun but something is missing. Due the reason that they are searching for porn actors and girls who like it kinky they never have a scene while they are performing. For example when a girl is doing a clown act she never got naked. They all have to shown their qualities before the camera with their clothes on. If you are making us horny then deliver it. And that's why the German movies are better in that way.In those movies girls do go naked and do perform in an explicit way. And it goes all the way, I can tell you that. It's a pity that Fred forgot that, I guess it all has to do with the US regulations about porn on DVD. But look, Germany is one of the hardest countries to get films in and out due to customs. But the gore is much better in the US ones. If we only could combine those two then we would have a roughie...But indeed, a 4 for the gore could have been more if...

You must have confidence

[nogodnomasters · 2/10 · 17 January 2018]

Two women who own a "modeling" agency with many promises interview people for a film. When they start performing in the film, they get tied up, tortured and killed in various bloody ways. That's it. No acting, no decent sound track. Just gore porn snuff.

Guide: F-word, sex, nudity. Explicit sex talk.

One of the worst films I have ever seen.

[poolandrews · 1/10 · 11 April 2010]

Maskhead starts as fetish porn producers Syl (Shelby Vogel) & Maddie (Danniella Inks) are holding auditions for aspiring actor's & actresses to appear in their seemingly tame fetish videos, there seems to be no shortage of applicant's who need to make some money & take part in the videos. The videos range from food sex to clown fetish but what the wouldbe actor's don't know is that the videos turn nasty, a big hulking man known only as Maskhead (Michael Witherel) gatecrashes the videos & promptly tortures & kills anyone foolish enough to participate. Apparently there's a big market for snuff films as Maskhead is kept very busy...

Directed by both Scott Swan who also wrote this thing & Fred Vogel who was one of the producers I have to say right from the start of this comment that I hated Maskhead, I thought it was one of the worst films I have ever seen (I have 3000 plus comments on IMDb & have seen many more before I even started writing comments here) & that's a lot of films to be the bottom of the pile of. For a start this is no plot, seriously Maskhead is as basic & underwritten, unadventurous & boring a film I have ever sat though. There are huge chunks of time spent showing potential victims interviews which add nothing, there's some crap about a Cowboy who hangs around mens toilets & to make matters even worse it's actually pretty tame. None of the murders are particularly imaginative or memorable or graphic while the fetish apart of the film is also disappointing with no eroticism to be seen anywhere, a woman dressed as a clown popping balloons, a man acting like a dog & a woman playing with food is as dull as it sounds, I suppose if you have one of these fetishes then Maskhead is a dream come true but to anyone else this is flat unerotic boredom at it's most embarrassing worst. The character's are awful, we never know why they do what they do, is for the money or the pleasure? How about a little motivation or reason? We never know how they get away with it, making videos showing people being murdered is a sure fire way to have the cops knocking on your door, right? We never find anything out about Maskhead, again who he is or what he does other than kill people. None of the people they kill are proper people, just cardboard cutouts & why are none of them ever missed? There are no subplots, no twists or turns & at 88 minutes it's horribly overlong.

Besides being a film devoid of any character's, any sort of plot or attempt at originality Maskhead has awful production values & looks like it was shot on a camcorder & I am pretty sure it was. Whenever we see one of the fetish videos from the cameras point of view the makers have decided to slap these black bars down either side of the screen for no apparent reason. The gore is actually quite tame, there's some blood splatter, someone is stabbed in the chest, an arm is broken & a bone sticks out when a woman has her arms cut open before an ending in which Maskhead rapes a woman with a huge wooden dildo in an embarrassingly bad scene with lousy effects (blood that looks like water, Maskhead not moving at all in the long shots while the close-up the wooden dildo is pumping). The film-making choices are also bad, there's an awful scene in which a fat Cowboy bloke has sex & the lights flicker on & off or something so there's this constant flickering which just annoyed me. The nudity is also surprisingly tame, there are a few bare breasts but nothing else & the scene in which the fat Cowby wearing a Cowboy hat & leather waistcoat fisting a male prostitute is unintentionally funny with the silly sound effects (just listen has he lubes his arm up) & the awful camera angle as it's placed about 20 feet away from the 'action'. The rock music also sounds terrible & gave me a headache.

The budget for this must have been minuscule, seriously did this cost more than a few thousand? The locations look like peoples homes, the special effects are poor, the fake blood is poor, the sound is poor, the cinematography is poor & the production values are real bottom of the barrel stuff. Maybe that was the point, I don't know but if it was then I need to ask the question what is film-making coming to when anyone with a camcorder & a few friends think they make a film? The acting is awful as well, the actor's look like they are reading their lines from cue cards & the screaming in the murder scenes is so fake.

Maskhead is a terrible film & it's as simple & straight forward as that. I hated it, I hated every second of it & I am positive 99% of people will feel the same way. Maskhead has zero entertainment value, is an eyesore to watch & is quite frankly boring crap from start to finish.

Like watching red paint dry...

[HowardRoarkII · 1/10 · 3 February 2010]

My goodness, was this a mistake... buying this DVD, that is. Well, I can save the empty DVD case, for possible future use. If you thought "August Underground" was kind of a badly made movie, let me tell you, AU is a well produced and high class product. In fact AU is not a badly made movie at all, I think it hits home (and most everywhere else) plus manage to find exactly the spot it is aiming for. "Maskhead" does not. "Maskhead" is not fun, neither intentionally or non-intentionally. "Maskhead" is not disgusting, not sexy (not even if you like bondage-porn, trust me), not horroresque, it is just boring, tedious and utterly pointless and, sorry guys, just kind of void of talent. (Makeup and effects are maybe not so bad...?) But, alas, this has to rate as one of the worst movies ever made, and not worst in any kind of good, camp, so-bad-it-is-good-way. Being boring and stupid is for me the ultimate unforgivable a movie can be... to be honest I watched ten minutes, then I couldn't take it any more but switched to fast forward, stopped here and there to no avail, and finally got to the end. Thank god. So the disc goes in the dust bin, and I will try to forget this embarrassing episode... Believe me, you have a lot more fun and find it a lot more interesting looking out your window, or if you do not have a window, staring at your wall.

The worst movie I have ever seen!

[souzaesai · 1/10 · 7 April 2013]

This movie is the worst I've seen b/c there was nothing original about it. It was just not good, pornographic, tasteless, and really an uncreative movie. This movie and "The Black Dahlia Haunting" inspired me and my friends to write and direct our own movie to show you guys how to actually make a movie. It's all about the acting guys. The writing has to actually be good and the cinematography can't be all awkward and amateurish like in this movie or The Haunting. Next time let's actually make a good movie alright guys? Stop this mindless stuff or you'll never make it in this business. I feel like the filmmakers just did all this crap in the movie just to get girls to take their clothes off in front of the camera. No this is not art so don't even try to justify it. It's a load of crap. Scott Swan and Fred Vogel are just a bunch of perverted and uncreative filmmakers.

A True Oddity From Toe Tag

[Illyngophobia · 5/10 · 30 November 2016]

The movie centers on Syl and Maddie, a young lesbian couple and their friend (only known as the Cowboy) that own and run a porn company that caters to the weird and quirky fetishes of their customers. However, unbeknownst to their actors, the company is secretly a front for a violent snuff film ring, where the real star of the show is a horrific disfigured and sadistic man known as Maskhead who tortures the actors in ways more cruel than the last.

The main characters are despicable and depraved in their own ways; from the Cowboy's crude and dirty sense of humor when seducing the victims, and Syl and Maddie gleefully discussing how they imagine the murders--clearly aroused by what they have in store for their unlucky "actors". As for their actors, they're alright even if some are a bit forgettable.

The acting is alright, but as someone else said in their own reviews, some scenes (such as the interviews) are pretty slow and the actual scenes with the actors are a very slow burn building to the more entertaining sequences, which are the violence. With the SFX, they're once again done wonderfully by Jerami Cruise and fairly impressive--especially with one of the final scenes with doesn't hold back any punches and is pretty disturbing.

I can see what people mean when it stays true to the mean-spirited attitude of the AU trilogy, which it definitely does if you also added a warped dark humor attitude to it, which can be a nice break from the violence if you're that kind of person who needs a cool down from more intense moments.

5/10

Sticking to the roots of August Underground, as well as adding new content to the genre

[Michael_V_Berg · 9 November 2009]

The lesbian couple Syl and Maddie like to produce innocent fetish movies, but each video contains a deadly twist; A huge man covered in bandages and a bizarre mask who tortures and kills the fetish-actors on tape.

Needless to say, the special effects looks spectacular and realistic. This is not for the faint of heart; Arms are sawed of, bones are broken and heads are being crushed like water melons.

The characters in the movie are brilliantly portrayed by their actors, and the acting is top notch at all times! Toetag tend to be very superficial with the characters, so it's nice to see a fresh breath of air for once!

The main character, Maskhead, is brilliantly portrayed by the big-boned Michael Witherel. When he walks in on the "movie-set" you'll be scared to death because he is so incredibly big! He is also covered in bandages, burns and (Self-injury?) scars. The villain is perfect, so why don't tell us more about the man behind the bandages?

Not really a complaint, but more of a question to Toetag; Who is Maskhead? If you have managed to invent such a brilliant villain, why don't you exploit him more? Squeeze every character potential out of him! I am begging for a sequel!

10/10

Toe Tag really is the future of horror and this beats another Hollywood remake

[akuma634 · 10/10 · 5 November 2010]

I'm a life long horror fan and I've seen thousands and thousands of horror movies from all over the world and movies that range from 1080p to shot on a cheap VHS camcorder in the 80's. Nowadays I feel almost dead inside because of crappy the horror genre has gotten and Hollywood really has ran out of ideas. The biggest mainstream horror movies are mostly stealing ideas from the underground, indie, other countries, or outright remaking movies. Toe Tag on the other hand makes horror movies for hardcore horror fans but seem to put people off who go in expecting just a gore movie. Maskhead really is the easiest Toe Tag movie to watch and it does feel like a nice merge of the underground and the mainstream.

As you've noticed on the main page, Maskhead is a collaboration between Fred Vogel (Toe Tag Pictures) and Scott Swan (best known for John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns.) Two young and creative minds getting together and really doing something unique. It's not another fake snuff film and it really isn't a masked killer or slasher film. The plot is about a modeling agency scouting for talent to make some soft core fetish videos. The movie is shot on two cameras, one is digital video hand camera which is mostly used during interviews and the other is a traditional steady camera. They film the movie almost like what you're watching is a mix of the footage the characters are filming but also it's like a movie where you see these characters off the set. The footage is mixed around so you'll see things out of chronology but it all makes more sense later on. The people that run the modeling agency are two lesbians and when they interview people (mostly porn stars and wannabe stars) they do throw in some really provocative questions to see how they react on the fly. Another major character is Cowboy who in opinion was one of the best movie characters of 2009 and this guy was just overflowing with charisma. He talks a lot and has all kinds of wild stories to tell. You just can't get bored with Cowboy because he really is a charmer. Then there's Maskhead, nobody really talks about him and he doesn't talk much but he appears very disfigured, he wears a horrific mask (which is probably just to scare the hell out of people) and he brings a snuff element to the fetish videos.

That's the main idea of the plot and characters without spoiling anything. The audition scenes were mostly shot unscripted and those provocative questions did throw some actors off guard. The people being auditioned and interviewed are interesting to hear from and why they want to get into porn. As you would expect the men are all very over confident. The next portion of their screen time is staring in the fetish video. One of the best scenes is the clown girl which actually has quite a cult following. She does things like a balloon fetish and other things until the she sees something she can not unsee, at which point Maskhead grabs her and kills her. Each porn star is in a scenario like that and often times it builds to something very awful happening to them before Maskhead steps in from the shadows. It's talked about that Maskhead is the real star of these videos. The murders are pretty brutal but it's not too hard to watch, I mean it's tame compared to the August Underground series which I think is nice because it's gruesome but it isn't too off putting. I'd say it would probably be a bit much for a casual horror fan like someone who loves the Saw series but if you've seen lots of ultra gory movies then Maskhead is a bit light, which isn't a bad thing by any means. Maskhead is more about the characters and it's way of telling the story than it is about hardcore violence. Also for a movie with porn as subject mater, there really isn't much in the way of sexual content or nudity, but then it is supposed to be a soft core fetish video. I really think Maskhead was the #1 horror movie of 2009. I'd recommend it to fans of gruesome underground horror as well as people who like horror but aren't looking for something that goes to the point of mental scaring or making you sick. If this is your first Toe Tag movie then I'd say this would be the best choice followed by The Redsin Tower and Sella Turcica, they really have came a long way from the studio making serial killer snuff movies.

Great horror-comedy

[HedBanger4 · 7/10 · 7 March 2011]

Let me start out by saying that I am a huge fan of ToeTag's movies, especially the August Underground trilogy. Those films actually managed to disturb me a bit, which no other films really have (and trust me I've seen a lot of f'd up stuff). When I first watched Maskhead I was expecting another brutal, disturbing horror but found it terribly boring aside from a few well done torture scenes. The main problem I had with it was that there was really no plot at all; we see the characters interview "actors" then kill them, and that's really it. Even August Underground's Mordum had the whole love triangle thing that got resolved in the end. However, I did remember laughing at a few parts so I watch it again with a friend with the intention of making fun of a low budget schlock-fest.

Man was that a great idea. This movie truly is hilarious, and I don't even wanna say unintentionally because I think the filmmakers purposefully included parts to be funny. I mean the whole scene with the cowboy and the gay guy in the bathroom? How can you watch that and not laugh? Speaking of the cowboy, he gets most of the funny lines in this movie like claiming how he is a "professional whistler" and his whole story about taking acid in the slaughterhouse. The whole "shot on film" look makes it even better. Bottom line if you enjoy laughing at low budgets horrors like I do, look no further.

No Mercy of a Feature!

[drahulrajjsd · 10/10 · 18 January 2018]

Maskhead is a movie that has no limits with its contents of intense violence, a bisexual cowboy, two lesbian snuff filmmakers, a disturbing masked killer known as the movie title itself - Maskhead. It's a movie that will satisfy fans of extreme cinema and it's definitely not a movie for the squeamish. Directed by Fred Vogel (The Man who brought us "The August Underground Trilogy" and many more hardcore horror features) and Scott Swan (writer of two "Master Of Horror" episodes - Cigarette Burns & Pro-Life). With all the blood shed and torture scenes, they're also some slowburn scenes, but it's still a 10 out of 10 for me and It would really be awesome to see a movie mainly about the movie title character itself, Maskhead.

Best Toe Tag film by far...

[Indyrod · 7/10 · 12 June 2010]

This fairly recent Toe Tag film directed by Fred Vogel, is actually pretty decent. Much more of a story than their usual productions (August Underground, Mordum), this one features a lesbian couple that interview victims for fetish and very gruesome movies, and then dispatch them in extremely brutal and graphically gory ways, via MASKHEAD, a disfigured maniac who likes to chop up his victims after torturing them. The movie plays with time, and you have to pay attention to figure out what the hell is going in, but in just about everyway, it delivers the goods, even though it can be a little confusing. I enjoyed it, it's borderline soft core, along with the extreme gore. It's definitely Toe Tags best film by far.

Mostly dull torture porn flick.

[HumanoidOfFlesh · 6/10 · 29 September 2010]

Two young lesbians Syl and Madie produce gruesome and gory fetish videos with the help of a gay cowboy.Actors or should I say potential victims show up to audition for Syl and Maddie and some of them are tortured to death and slowly butchered by Maskhead,a disfigured sadist."Maskhead" is not as disturbing as "August Undergorund" trilogy.Admittedly the final scene is pretty sick and disturbing and the gore effects by Jerami Cruise are excellent,but the interviews are dull and annoying.Several scenes are too long and lead to nowhere.The acting is decent and the film is awashed with pain and suffering,so it's not a total waste.More graphic nudity should be also mandatory in this kind of sicko horror.A generous 6 out of 10.

Not August Underground but still good

[ewamccurdy · 6/10 · 16 September 2018]

Ok, first things first. Don't pay attention to the negativity. To Tag pictures is a low budget true underground horror movie production label. And for the 4 I've seen they've delivered what horror should.

Maskhead, not your avergae lesbian couple. Holding auditions for future pornstars but when they refuse to do something asked of them a killer known as Maskhead kills him or her or them.

For a low low budget movie this was pretty good. Fred Vogel is the American Ulli Lommel. He has the talent to tell a story without having a set of good guys that face off with killers.

This isn't August Underground but if you like underground horror movies this one is for you.