Skinned Deep

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.

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!

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.

I had myself pretty much prepared for Skinned Deep given the fact that I've rented several Fangoria released films in the past, and generally know what to expect. Usually there's no plot, bad dialog, no scares, in fact just about everything is bad with a Fangoria release except for the gore.

And I suppose that's why I keep coming back to these flicks.

Skinned Deep does deliver on the gore quite early in the film, but pretty much leaves you hungry for more and the only thing there to chew on is one terrible line, plot point, or general stupid place in the movie. This thing just plods along after the initial kills, forcing you to watch weird scene after weird scene that made little or no sense.

People have pointed out the relations to Basket Case, TCM, and Troma a few times already in other reviews... That doesn't matter. They can give props to anyone they want, it's not going to make this strange flick any better.

1.5/5 corpses... Avoid, unless you want to see the Napoleon Dynamite of horror movies.

Gabe has worked on some great movies and with some great people. I suspect this movie was made because he knew he could do it on the cheap and the phrase "why the hell not" was probably thrown around quite a bit.

It's not very enjoyable to watch, but it's a lot of fun to talk about. If you're, say, two idiots that run a horror movie podcast, you could do worse than watching this movie to discuss it and have a great laugh. If you're not a nutty gorehound or going to discuss this with your goofy friends, there's really no point in watching it.

However, for people in those very narrow bands of viewership, there is some value here.