Johnny Skidmarks

This is a really interesting movie that I thoroughly dug and enjoyed. It's part intense character study, part paranoid suspense-thriller, part chase movie. The setup is this: John Scardino is a police crime & accident scene photog who is emotionally numb inside and moonlights as the lens man for an extortion ring, taking dirty snaps of compromised businessmen in their undies with a saucy hooker named Lorraine in sleazy motel rooms. Suddenly, Scardino starts seeing the blackmail crew from his night job turning up as corpses in his day job in seemingly unrelated homicides. Scardino is the only one who notices the connection, but he can't say squat without revealing his involvement in a criminal enterprise! He rediscovers his emotional inner self by getting major league heebie-jeebies trying to figure out who the killer is. He's taken so many snaps over the years, it could be just about anybody. No one can be trusted! Halfway through, the movie explodes open and turns really grisly and intense--be prepared!

The acting--by Peter Gallagher, Frances McDormand, John Lithgow, Jack Black, Geoffrey Lower, John Kapelos, Charlie Spradling and Lee Arenberg--is great and infinitely diggable. The dialogue is really wry and darkly funny, as is the music. And the movie's look has a kind of Edward Hopper-film noir thing going that I also really dug.

Not a lot of people saw this flick when it first came out. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, then went straight to HBO. Which is weird, because it's so good. This one's a real find. Go forth and dig it!

--Richard Terhune, The Movie Digger

I found Skidmarks absolutely compelling. Peter Gallagher plays a crime-scene photographer with a sideline of blackmailing men who take his prostitute friend to motels. Gallagher, whom I've not much liked in other movies, does a terrific job as the numb, depressed antihero, unaffected by the crime scenes and accident scenes he photographs until his fellow blackmailers start turning up as victims. The movie is full of deadpanned quips and black humor (e.g., the exchange between McDormand and Gallagher when she's trying to pick him up in a hamburger joint. McDormand, cool and tough: "Do you have a name?" Gallagher: "Yeah. Do you?") The film is not flashy enough ever to have made it big, but the plot and characters are utterly original and the acting is uniformly excellent.

I enjoyed this movie. The characters were portrayed interestingly and the story moved along nicely. There were not many surprises, and some of the more gruesome scenes were stretched out longer than necessary. The main attraction was the quirkiness of the characters.

Peter Gallagher is a police crime photographer (hence his nickname). He's a widower and hangs out at his brother-in-law Jack Black's burger joint, where he has recently met and begun an affair with grass widow and recovering alcoholic Frances McDormand. He also has a profitable side business of taking blackmail photos of men lured to a cheap motel by a prostitute; that ring is run by John Kapelos. And now the other members of the blackmail ring are being murdered. Pal John Lithgow is heading the investigation and Gallagher is worrying that Lithgow may not catch the killer before Gallagher is murdered. Also, that he might catch the murderer and Gallagher's activities will be revealed.

It's certainly a well cast, well lit neo-noir that bumps along at a steady pace despite the erratic behavior of everyone. The only real distraction is that Gallagher seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton, and I kept imagining how he would have handled the role. Over all, it's unremarkable, but it certainly is engaging while it's on the screen.

This movie was better then I expected.

What little gore there was was top notch and effective to the scene,and the production values were fine.

I loved Jack black in it...he was the only Comedy in this "dark comic mystery"

John Lithgow was over the top,and fun as a psycho cop,and Gallagher was very good as the brooding photographer.

The script was a little weak and not fleshed out that well,still all in all a good movie.

The basic story is a freelance photographer gets in over his head with blackmail...then add some twists.