No, it's not the Jim Carrey comedy but an utterly obscure and sadly forgotten cheapie from the glorious early 60's. Honestly, I never would have known about this movie's existence if it weren't for a modest film festival held in my country, which included this movie in their nostalgic 3-D tribute series. Apart from the obvious classics, like "House of Wax" and "Creature from the Black Lagoon", they programmed this peculiar little oddity and it unexpectedly became a pleasant little surprise to pretty much everyone in the theater. The plot is non-existent and rudimentary schlock, but the 3-D sequences are nothing short of mesmerizing and vastly astonishing, especially if you bear in mind the time of release as well as the budget Julian Roffman presumably had to work with. The story is actually comparable to the one in the aforementioned Jim Carrey vehicle. Whenever someone puts on the titular mask, he/she undergoes a drastic transformation. But instead of changing into a jolly green-faced comedian, the mask-wearer here directly enters hell, witnesses all sorts of delirious and flashy tableaux and inevitably develops homicidal tendencies. The ambitious and stubborn psychiatrist Allan Barnes receives the mask from a patient who just committed suicide, and instead of returning it to the police or to museum where it got stolen from, he keeps it for research. Barnes constantly convinces his fiancée and himself he's resistant to the mask's powerful satanic side effects, but of course he soon undergoes an incurable transformation. The 3-D footage often doesn't make the slightest bit of sense and/or can't possibly get linked to the rest of the events in the film, but you'll at least have to admit the scenes are trippy and bizarre beyond comparison. There are gigantic skulls emerging from sacrificial altars, large mummified hands launching big balls of fire, ravishing witches luring you with their fingers, trees coming to life before your eyes and literally loads of other lovely stuff. Like any forceful type of drug, the 3-D scenes work addictive and pretty soon you don't even care about the wraparound story anymore as you're simply counting down the minutes until you can put those geeky red & green goggles on again. There's a funny introduction at the start of the film, in which a supposedly acclaimed collector explains to the audience they should put on our "masks" whenever the protagonists puts on his. If that isn't clear enough yet, there's also the brain-penetrating voice-over repeatedly shouting the phrase "Put
the mask
ON!!!". This is, plain and simply, undemanding but extremely relaxing 60's entertainment. It's probably not worth encouraging people to desperately seek for a decent copy (and, of course, matching glasses), but I'm glad I saw it nevertheless.
