The Mask (1961)

Best movie of this year hands down!

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Great news! Kino plans to release a restored version of this movie in Blu-Ray 3D on November 24 2015 so the fantasy sequences should really be effective. Those scenes were really the only reason to watch an otherwise banal movie but they were released in anaglyph 3D which was never that effective to begin with. Seeing it in f/s Blu-Ray 3D will be a whole new experience and should be a real trip! Basically the story deals with a psychiatrist who is troubled by the suicide of a patient until he receives a package from the man that was sent just before his death. It contains an ancient Aztec mask but when he puts it on the doctor experiences wild hallucinations. This low budget Canadian production is notable only for those sequences and they should be awesome in this newly restored version.

Wonderful movie. First I have seen from this time period (aside from "The Incredible Shrinking Man") that actually scared me. A psychiatrist gets addicted to an alternate reality that can be entered by putting on an ancient mask. Trouble is it slowly renders the wearer insane. I wholeheartedly disagree with the majority of viewers here who say the non-3-d sequences are dull. I found them entertaining and well acted. The whole thing can certainly be read as a metaphor for drug use. The actual 3-D isn't that great (it isn't like things are thrust out at the viewer). It looks more vaguely 3-D. But the sequences themselves are fascinating and weird and demand repeated viewings. I think the really striking aspect of this film is the sound design. It truly was ahead of its time. I can't think of another film that makes such mesmerizing, hypnotic use of sound design. I'd be curious to know how they did it.Sounds are slowed down to a throbbing groan, echoes reverberate in and out and a sonic thumping pounds every time someone gets ready to put on the mask. Just listen to the voice-over when the suicide note is read (doctor's patient). I love it. Watch it. I watched scenes again and again after my first viewing.

This movie really grows on you. Yes, it's true, the non-3D parts are boring, but I find them functional. Like any good freak-out movie, if it was all a freak out, you'd get worn out fast. This is like a freak-out musical in a way, where the freaky scenes are the equal of big musical numbers.A doctor is turned on to a creepy mask by one of his patients who has turned into a homicidal maniac. Next thing you know, the doctor is trying on the mask and going insane, and oh what a mess, and his girlfriend and everyone, and blah blah blah. Meanwhile, in the hallucinogenic mask sequences, you get to experience what it must have been like to be on LSD in the 60's. There's a whole "alternate world," where a strange, mutated man is milling around, looking for the woman (?) he is in love with in a fever dream landscape where there are skulls and burning hands and satanists and gore and other neato stuff. And it's all in bizarro 3-D! Even if it doesn't work well all the time, it's still mighty disturbing, especially for a movie from 1961! The images, and the incredible, collage-like soundtrack to the freak sequences will linger on your brain long afterwards, in the same way that wearing those horrible glasses leave an impression on your eyes after you take them off for the "normal" scenes. You're exhausted, and confused, and weirded out.Yay

This silly, stagy, slow moving horror film is probably still the best 3D movie ever made. Once you wait through the bland story, and the call comes to "Put On The Mask"; it becomes another film. These 3D sequences are the best, freakest ever put on film, and they transfer to TV remarkably well in the Elvira edition. If you have any taste for oddities at all, this is a must.