Director – Anders Palm, Screenplay/Producer – Mark Cutforth, Photography – John de Borman, Music – Julian Wastall, Songs – Phil Butcher & John King, Makeup Effects – Image Animation (Stuart Conran, Brian Hill & Cliff Wallace), Production Design – Max Gottlieb. Production Company – Strange Cinema.
Cast
Gregory Cox (Jackson), Fiona Evans (Shelly), Edward Brayshaw (Father), Debbie Lee London (Christi), Kim Fenton (Nick), Ann Conrich (Ann), Robin Welch (Pete), Gary Brown (Albert), Annabel Yuresha (Patti), Adrian Hough (Mick), Helen Rochelle (Monica)
Plot
The masked serial killer Jackson appears at a London party and slaughters all the attendees. He goes to kill the blind Shelly, who has been waiting for her date but instead she thinks that he is her date. She feels sympathy for him because he has to hide behind a mask because of his hideously disfigured appearance. After she takes him home, Jackson realises he is in love with Shelley and decides he wants to forsake his serial killing ways for her.
Unmasked Part 25 was a directorial debut for Swedish-born director Anders Palm. Palm went on to direct only two other films with Murder on Line One (1989) and Murder Blues (1991), which are both serious works about serial killers. Elsewhere, Palm has worked as a producer with genre films such as Compulsion (2013), Trench 11 (2017), The Executioners (2018) and Cascade (2023).
The Slasher Film appeared following the successes of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). These produced a great many sequels and copycats, before the original fad seemed to be over and done with in large part by about 1983. During this time, the slasher genre even generated its own subset of parodies with the likes of Student Bodies (1981), National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982) and Pandemonium/Thursday the 12th (1982).
Unmasked Part 25 is a slasher parody with an amusing central idea – what if a slasher maniac such as Jason Voorhees found a love interest and wanted to give up hacking and slashing to be with them? This plays out with an initial amusement, even if it is odd hearing a Jason-type maniac speaking with a posh boarding school British accent.
The blind girl (Fiona Evans) and the slasher maniac (Gregory Cox) in love
The main problem with Unmasked Part 25 is that it has one cute idea – the slasher manic in love – and no clue how to actually develop it as a story. The couple end up in bed the following scene after they meet, the Jason-alike realises love for her and that is about it. The rest of the time the film seems at wont of knowing what else to do and menders around looking for direction. We get assorted scenes between the killer (Gregory Cox) and his abusive father (Edward Brayshaw); others where the killer joins girlfriend Fiona Evans’s friends at the pub; even PG-rated ones where Fiona tries to introduce the killer to whips and bondage. It feels as though the film blows its bolt early in the show and has no real notion of what else to do with its premise. You cannot help but feel that is something that might have made for a cute short film but is stretched trying to pad out a full-length one.
Image Animation – the only people on the credits with any name recognition factor, who had just come from providing the memorable effects for Hellraiser (1987), which made their name – deliver some quite gory deaths, especially during the opening moments, where we see one guy have his face torn off, a couple impaled against a wall by a spear while making out and one guy’s heart ripped out, and later Edward Brayshaw’s head being crushed.
