Blood Mask: The Possession of Nicole Lamoureaux

So let's take a look at what we've got here:

1. Movie opens with murder scene set in the past.

2. Next scene shows college students, many of whom are horny assholes, and one of whom is psychotic.

3. Friends (who don't seem to even like each other, having completely misinterpreted their "snappy banter" as hateful bickering) go to creepy house.

4. Psychotic girl is possessed by evil spirit.

5. Possessed girl demonstrates supernatural powers and uncanny knowledge of the house's layout while killing off her friends one by one.

6. Girl ends up killing everyone but her boyfriend.

7. Girl receives medical treatment, but reveals in the final shot of the movie that she is still evil.

Those seven points could be a breakdown of either The Curse of Lizzie Borden or Blood Mask, and either way they would be describing a terrible movie. Still, as insipid and unwatchable as Lizzie Borden was, it pales in comparison to the maelstrom of stupidity that is Blood Mask.

Kristin J. Johnson's screenplay is a crime against humanity, being somehow insulting to the audience, the cast, and its own intelligence. Dennis Devine doesn't do himself any favors with his direction. I don't know, maybe he's a great director and he just decided to give up once he saw the material he'd be working with. I tend to doubt it, though, given that he's directed no less than three movies with combinations of the words "vampire" and "sorority" in their titles. In any event, his greatest failing as a director for this movie is not figuring out where to point the camera, but rather the fact that he never seemed to actually direct. I can't fathom actors delivering performances this outrageously terrible with a director actually giving them guidance. It takes pure, unmeasured chaos to create something like this.

Blood Mask doesn't improve on the technical side of things. From the minute the movie begins, it is guilty of that most heinous of audio crimes - being inaudibly soft one minute, then jumping to banshee-like volumes the next. The result is that you find yourself constantly having to turn up the volume to try to catch the wisps of plot, only to then have your eardrums ruptured by a scream, or a sudden chord, or someone dropping something. The epileptic editing does not help in this regard. In the end, Blood Mask is basically a nightmarish failure on every level, but it's the insulting dialogue and plot that contradicts itself even as it unfolds that will make me hate this movie for the rest of my days.

– Ben "Greasnin" Platt