Stickiness and Son of the Mask's Transcendently Shitty "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" Setpiece
I just barely eke out a living writing about the worst entertainment life has to offer. Most recently, I finally subjected myself to 2005’s The Son of the Mask for My World of Flops.
It’s crazy to think that the column itself, which I began in 2007, is only slightly younger than a movie that came out nineteen years ago. When I conceptualized My Year of Flops and then My World of Flops, I wanted to write about the biggest, most humiliating disasters in entertainment.
I’m talking about notorious pabulum like The Son of the Mask. It’s no garden variety stinker but rather a monstrosity that deserves its reputation as one of the worst movies and sequels ever made.
When I choose a movie, television show, book, or album for My World of Flops, I want it to be fun to write about and to make an indelible impression. I want to feel passionately about it.
I am drawn to movies that promise to be outright abominations, like The Son of the Mask. Jamie Kennedy’s genre-mashing cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” has been running through my head nonstop since I saw and wrote about the movie late last week.
It’s a big, flashy set piece that angrily demands attention. It’s the scene that introduces Jamie Kennedy as the madcap new Mask after Jim Carrey bailed on a sequel for understandable reasons.
The “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” set piece is supposed to be a show-stopper, the kind of scene audiences talk about with friends. It’s supposed to have what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as “stickiness,” that ineffable X factor that separates the legendary from the forgettable.
Kennedy’s splashy introduction as The Mask succeeded in turning heads, but not in the way intended. I watched and then re-watched the scene with open-mouthed horror. It’s a trainwreck of a sequence that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Turtle Club sequence in Master of Disguise and the rap at the beginning of The Pest because it is so exquisitely wrong.
The “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” scene has the same template as a music video from the 1980s. Jamie Kennedy’s obnoxious anti-hero is at a work party where the band is so bad and so lifeless that they are single-handedly ruining the soiree. It goes beyond that. The band isn’t just ruining the party; it’s bumming people out. It’s making them angry. It’s causing them to rethink their life choices.
Then, a boss, played by Steven Wright, says, “This party is embarrassing. Can’t we stir things up a little?” to Jamie Kennedy, and things go from sleepy to overly caffeinated.
Kennedy leaps onstage and begins performing what can very generously be deemed a Hip Hop cover of the golden oldie but with lyrics like “Shake your pants like this, shake your pants!”
The inferior new Mask helpfully specifies that he wants women to shake their booties as well, but “shake your pants” is not a thing! It is not a phrase. It’s not part of the Hip Hop lexicon. It’s not ebonics. It’s nonsense, and it made me weirdly angry.
Then the Mask morphs into a green-skinned Neil Diamond to perform a schlocky 1970s-style cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You”, complete with costume change.
In the theatrical cut of The Son of the Mask, the scene ends with Kennedy in a snow-white suit for a big band finish, but the original cut lasted two minutes longer and featured even more pointless genre-hopping.
In this sadistically extended scene, the Mask performs “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” as a country song, a heavy metal banger, and a showcase for superpowered beatboxing.
At some point in the very near future, I’ll be able to get “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” out of my head, but there is, alas, a very good chance that it will be replaced by something nearly as obnoxious.
I did, after all, have the Banana Splits theme song going through my mind for weeks after writing about the movie for this site.
So while it’s no damn fun having the worst-ever cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” running through my mind at all times, it could, horrifyingly, always be worse.