Leslie Vernon Rises From the Grave!

If you've been visiting MNPP since its early days... good grief we're all so old now right? Wait that wasn't the point I was making. My point is I started this site in 2005 (good lord) and in 2006 a little meta-horror flick called Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon came out, and I was obsessed. I wrote about it a ton. I have the action figure; I have the poster. (And here is my original review.) Its hottie leading man Nathan Baesel even has a tag here on the site -- one that hasn't been added to in a decade, which was the last time I whined about wanting a sequel. 

Well here it is twenty years after that film dropped and at a screening this week to celebrate that milestone the film's director Scott Glosserman dropped the news that we are in fact now getting a sequel! And everyone involved is returning! Holy shit! I really thought this day had passed. Not to be rude (ti's hard to get movies made!) but Glosserman somehow turned the hot buzz off the original into a whole lot of nothing -- he made an MTV horror movie in 2011 called The Truth Below that went nowhere and that was all she wrote on his career apparently. 

I haven't actually sat down and watched Leslie Vernon in a very very long time, but weirdly, a couple times over the past couple of years, it's popped into my head and I've been thinking about revisiting -- well here's the nudge I needed. If you don't remember what it's about or if, hell some of you weren't even born when this movie came out (good grief) -- the movie tells the story of a journalist named Taylor (Angela Goethals) who decides to make a documentary where she follows the titular slasher killer Leslie (Baesel) on his stalking and killing rounds. Obviously this project is a doomed one. It's very good, or at least I remember it being very good -- we'll have to see how it's aged. But I remember both of the leads being really solid and it being genuinely unsettling. Anybody watch it recently?