Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

I'll be honest, I wanted to resist "Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon." It's just me -- when everyone says a movie's some brilliant satire/deconstruction of a genre I tend to roll my eyes because, more often than not, the people saying that don't necessarily understand satire/deconstruction and will chalk any basic in-joke up as great satire.

And the first part of "Behind the Mask," a mocumentary about a man who believes he's the next Freddy/Jason/Michael seems like it isn't going to do much but lay out all those in jokes. The fact that it was a mocumentary made it seem all the more simplistic. Surely there was no way this movie could set-up everything it was setting up and still pay the thing off at the end in any sort of respectable or intelligent way.

Yeah, I was wrong. This movie absolutely pays off its entire set-up and then some. And given that that set-up is practically the entire first two acts of the movie, that's no small task.

For the first hour or so of this movie we meet the man who may or may not be Leslie Vernon, a small-town outcast who committed a heinous crime as a child who was presumably killed by the locals. Because of his story he's convinced he's the next supernatural serial killer to terrorize a small town by butchering local teenagers. This is the literal world of Freddy, Michael and Jason -- Leslie knows who they are, has studied them and now is ready to start his adventures using their formula for success. It takes "Scream's" rules and amplifies them 100 times, Leslie lays out his entire plan, the entire movie and reveals every trick, nuance and protocol there is in a slasher movie. He plans for it, he picks the crew of kids he's going to stalk, he figures out where they'll go to party so he can have his revenge, he figures out the order of the killings. Seriously, no detail is ignored or glossed over.

The set-up works and the final act resolves and embraces the set-up completely, turns it on its ear and then works inside those rules without copping out. I don't want to give anything away because the surprises are that well-thought out. But to put THAT many rules on a series of events and then completely stick to them is something I never imagined the movie would be able to do.

This is not a snarky movie, it's not there to take the piss out of the slasher genre, it's a celebration of them -- at least that's how it feels watching it (I have no idea what the creators' intentions were, to be honest.) This is a love letter to these movies, a love letter that says 'these movies work, the characters that get caught up inside them can still be trapped, even if they're self-aware, even if they know they're in a slasher story.'

Not even the mocumentary concept gets in the way, mostly because the creators are smart enough to know when to leave it behind and get to the actual storytelling.

I'm not sure "Behind the Mask" is a particularly scary movie -- I'd say "Scream" delivered far more legitimate scares. What "Behind the Mask" is is a brilliant movie that delivers tension and unpredictability even though it claims to have laid out the entire final sequence for you earlier. It is able to be unpredictable because it sets up its structure and format so perfectly.

Anyone with a love or interest in slasher movies needs to see "Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon." I have a feeling the more you know about the genre, the more you're going to get sucked in. And then get caught not knowing what's going to happen next, even though they already told you.