Clearly, I have decided that it’s the right time to clear out some of the lesser films in the cabinet. And, brother, the cabinet is full of lesser films. I bought this sequel to 1994’s The Mask at some point in the past (before I was fastidious and fatuous in enumerating most of my media purchases here on the blog). I saw The Mask in the theaters one night when I was staying with Dr. Comic Book on one of my excursions to Milwaukee right after I graduated. I remember that he and some of his city friends, who were some miscreants, got a hold of a video cassette of a non-Milwaukee town councilman shooting himself at a news conference, and we watched it several times because they thought it was a hoot. Me, not so much, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye. Eh, but we were talking about The Son of the Mask, a sequel that came out eleven years later when Hollywood was new to mining old movies and properties. Although two of the last three films I have seen were dated 1993 (Grumpier Old Men) and 1997 (Alien: Resurrection), so maybe this has been a constant Hollywood thing which Millenials Discover and post on the Internet about. After all, my pool company is named after a swimming champion who played Tarzan (Buster Crabbe), and that’s not the swimming champion who played Tarzan that my boys and I watched (Johnny Weissmuller), not to mention the Tarzan I watched on television (Ron Ely) or the film that we saw on HBO (Christopher Lambert). But I really am going at length to talk about anything but this film.
Well, enough of that. In this film, the mask from the first film has washed to Fringe City, where a dog finds it. The dog belongs to a cartoonist who’s working as a costumed character at an animation studio (played by Jaime Kennedy, whom I think was supposed to become a thing at that time). Cartoonist’s wife wants to have a baby, but cartoonist is unsure. But when he needs a costume for a Hallowe’en party, he puts on the mask and revives a party from its doldrums, and he comes home and sires a baby. But! Because he was wearing the mask, the baby has the powers of Loki. Which somes in handy, because Odin has charged Loki with finding the mask because it’s causing havoc amongst the mortals. Then the wife has to go off for a week and leave the cartoonist, now tasked with coming up with a pitch for the networks based on the antics of his character–him while wearing the mask at the party. The dog, jealous of the baby’s attention, puts on the mask, and we get the dog and the baby competing for the father’s attention, sort of–the baby, fed on a visual diet of cartoons (so the cartoonist can work), tries to make the father crazy so he can go to the psychopathic hospital. Also, Loki is closing in to find the mask.
So it’s a silly little live-action cartoon of a film that lacks the Jim Carrey of the original, and, to be honest, a lot of the stakes of the original. I mean, they did go in a different direction (they actually invoke the difference between Alien and Aliens, which is the second time I’ve come across this explanation for a change in direction in a franchise recently–although, perhaps, the first was when looking into Alien: Resurrection). It would probably have done a little better as an independent story of some sort, but I guess they had enough in the Mask mythos (the comic books and the film) that they rolled with it. Not as good as the original, and more of a cartoon/kids movie.
It did feature Traylor Howard as the wife/mother, though.
I’ve seen her previously in Dirty Work, which I need to watch again sometime, and she played Natalie in the television series Monk which I might pick up if I see it in the wild.
For some reason, I think she’s really pretty, but she’s not the kind of pretty that makes it in the fashion or modeling world, so it’s not the “beautiful” that they try to feed to us.
