Écorché vif

This movie starts of really bad like Troma wanted to make a Texas Chainsaw Massacre Rip Off. An incredibly stupid family gets lost in nowhere and meets a creepy family who happen to kill them. Creepy? I meant to write "cheesy"... there's an evil granny, a guy with a huge brain who adopts the surviving daughter, a hyperactive midget throwing dinner plates and a maniac in the vein of House of 1000 corpses with a bear trap in his face (and the subjective view like in "Predator"). Now when this isn't odd enough the movie puts scene on scene which just makes you wonder if this is a satire or a real bad slip on a Maniac-Hillbilly Movie. The gore is pretty rare and reminds of old "Bad Taste" days, especially with the exploding heads. But the humor is just insane in this movie... a bunch of bikers come to help the girl but they are all from the retirement home and call themselves "The ancient ones". Now you get exploding seniors and a senile bum beating up the midget and ripping his head off to play football with it. Sounds insane?? Then meet "The creator", a headless muscle hunk in a strip show style environment where his offspring breeds. He is not just flexing his muscles but also talking some incredible philosophic bullshit. Oh and his crotch sais "dyno-mite"... now guess what the girl finds in it later to launch some explosives and real cheesy FX?!? "Skinned Deep" is an insane or rather schizophrenic movie... it slides between classic horror, total trash (the bum fight reminded me a lot of the "Street Trash" style), over the edge politically incorrect humor like Troma delivers it and a mixture of real bad camera and effects and some pretty decent shots and splatter or explosive effects. One minute you want to turn the movie off, the next you smile because of the absolute insanity of it. The movie ends with the typical "sequel awaiting" finale but tops it off with the credits rolling on the girl screaming for several minutes in an incredibly funny way. I couldn't help but laugh there. If you dig trash with a strange sense of humor you might dig this movie... its different for sure. Anyway I don't know if I want to slap the makers for this piece or shake hands for creating something uniquely stupid that somehow managed to keep my attention till the end. I don't really know what happened here.

There's no real plot to the movie. It's just a loose collection of ideas strung together in something resembling a plot. That ultimately makes it one bizarre movie. This rivals a Blood Diner or Ichi the Killer for just sheer strangeness. It's not necessarily good but it isn't bad either. I can't really score it as that would imply this is an actual movie and not some bizarre experiment in performance art gone horribly awry.

The only real gripe to have with the movie outside of the fact that it looks like it was shot on video, is the aforementioned story. Really, it plays like three different movies. The first third is typical slasher sleaze, the middle is some bizarre form of social commentary, and the last third is a survival film. Really I would've tightened the script up and put it more on a Nightbreed route with the daughter eventually accepting the freaks and finish it out in a finale of bikers vs. freaks in an all-out war. But really I'm guessing that wouldn't have worked as it looked like their budget was already being stretched thin.

Consider it one really bizarre movie that was too ambitious for its own good/budget.

Sweet Jesus...

While watching Skinned Deep I thought I was watching a bad movie from the mid 90's - but nope! This 2004 indie flick is so messed up in all departments, I actually couldn't even enjoy it as a so-bad-its-good movie!!

While listed as a comedy horror in its synopsis, I honestly don't think it had the smallest bit of comedy in it during production. Only since its release and ratings do I believe that the word comedy was added to make it seem that all the terrible bits were on purpose.

Taking more than its fair share of inspiration from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; House Of A 1000 Corpses; and Jeepers Creepers - Skinned Deep does have moments where it could have been something sweet, although had it been from a better director, editor and stronger cast! The acting is among the worst I have ever seen - I mean,dreadful - especially the mother of the maniacs, and how the they got Warwick Davis to do this I'll never know!!

The camerawork is also dreadful with many dirty lenses and awful shots, marred once again by the bad editing. Is there anything good? Well, the FX work is very well done, with a great character in the Surgeon General - although they never really know how to use him properly, and Warwick Davis gets to play a mental ADHD fuelled crazed ninja-of-sorts who uses plates for weapons - it has to be seen to be believed.

Skinned Deep is something else! Its confused, its messy, its funny for all the wrong reasons, and for me - its a hard watch because it seems like such a wasted opportunity. And I haven't even got to the biker pensioners yet or that bizarre twisted ending...

This makes Godfrey Ho look like Kubrick!

Skinned deep, this is a masterpiece of bad movie making. To most people, saying that this movie is terrible would be an instant turn off but for me that just sounds like a dare. Enough, about this movie. Its sorta like Rob Zombie's house of 1,000 corpses... well, strike that, its exactly like house of a 1,000 corpses except they had a budget of like 8$. That's slightly unfair, because this did have the star power of Warwick davies. That may sound sarcastic but its not meant to be, Warwick rocks. It also has a guy called Surgeon General who happens to have the coolest mask i've ever seen and some headless guy wearing a belt that proclaims his crotch to be "Dyno-mite". Assuming your still reading this, which may be a mistake on my part, the movie is about a girl whose family is killed in the first 15 minutes of the movie, including her kid brother. Bravo to Skinned deep for breaking rules of killing kids in a monster movie. You should know, in case your mourning the deaths of these imaginary people already, each one of them had it coming. Seeing them die is the first of many oh so rewarding moments in this movie. that moment is in line with a naked man with a gigantic head runningdown a street and a fight between old people and the hick/monsterfamily who really just steal every scene they are in. No part of this movie is a let down, even up to the very end where the best song ever plays through the credits, by song, i mean a girl screaming for like five minutes. I can't urge you to see this any harder, seriously.

Troma + David Lynch + Texas Chainsaw Massacre = Skinned Deep

Aside from the lead, Warwick Davis and the guy who played Brain, the acting is pretty much awful. It looks like it was shot on video. The majority of the budget looks like it went to the special effects, (which were decent.) (Considering the director is a special effects artist, this was no surprise.) The, uh, story was a bare-bones Texas Chainsaw knock-off. The dialogue zig-zagged between hilarious and cringe-worthy.

Overall, though, I enjoyed it. I hope it gets some kind of DVD distribution, because I would probably buy a copy. It's just so goofy and weird that I couldn't help but smile through it.

"NO! NO! NNNOOOO! NO! NNNNNNOOOOOOOO!! NNOOO! NO!!! NOOOOOOOOO!!"