Skinner

The movie Skinner is about a serial killer who has a disturbing hobby of skinning his victims and then wearing their skin like clothing. To me, that sounds like a credible horror film story line, but the execution of this film was very poor. The acting was unbelievable, the film quality looked like the movie was filmed in the 1800s, and the effects were not good at all. I would not recommend this film to anyone at all for any reason. There are no memorable scenes or lines in this movie, so I'm going to give it a 1 out of 10 star rating.

Skinner feels like someone put a Hitchcockian thriller, a trashy Euro giallo, an 80's slasher movie, and a John Waters movie into a blender and served it up. There are inspired moments and Ted Raimi's performance is interesting and committed, but the film as a whole feels a little wonky like a woman trying to walk with only one stiletto on a rainy evening. One thing is for sure - a scene where Raimi murders a black man and wears his face while taunting another victim with a Fat Albert-esque voice is genuinely unforgettable.

A serial killer rents a room with a nice young couple and continues his killing spree as one of his surviving victims tracks him down to kill him once and for all.

Skinner has enough style to pull you through some rough patches, but with a cast as game and diverse as Ted Raimi, Ricki Lake, and Traci Lords, it's hard to not have a good time with it. I'd expected it to be gorier than it actually was, but the sheer bizarre quality of the story and some of the performances were enough to keep my interest.

Now...I am a HUGE Ted Raimi fan, and I bought this movie under the assumption that this highly underrated actor would be in a starring role and make a worthwhile movie. However, this is not the case. Although this movie had promise, the script needed work (to say the least), the audio track was terrible, and I sense that there was a lot of poor editing done, because it was full of plot holes. The only thing I really learned was that the skin of the bully that the dog ate must have been poisonous, because I can think of NO OTHER REASON why the dog died. Its really a shame, too, since poor Ted has not been offered more leading roles because he is immensely talented. I'm just sorry that his brother's perpetual habit of putting him in the background drove Ted to this during his early career. Tracy Lords mumbled her way through, and I wondered how in the hell a DVD has a video roll in it. I guess I'll just swallow my $9.00 loss (at least the shipping was free), and be glad that there is better Ted Raimi fare out there.

If there's one thing I've learnt from Skinner, it's not to accept a dinner invitation from Ricki Lake: 20 minutes to prepare and cook an entire chicken?!?! That sounds like a recipe for some serious E.coli to me. And while we're at it, Ted Raimi isn't so hot on kitchen hygiene either: he fails to wash his hands after manhandling the chicken and proceeds to spread bacteria all over the place.

Of course, a bout of serious food poisoning is still preferable to being killed and flayed, which is what Raimi's character, Dennis Skinner, likes to to do hookers, using their skin to create a suit in which he can prance around in the moonlight (a man's got to have a hobby). When Skinner's landlady, Kerry Tate (Lake), becomes close to her loony lodger, the psycho decides that the time is right to reveal his secret to the lucky lass, much to her horror. Meanwhile, Heidi (Traci Lords), morphine-addicted survivor of one of Skinner's earlier attacks, hunts the psycho looking for revenge.

Skinner is by no means a great movie, suffering from an erratic narrative and plot details that are left frustratingly unexplained (what is up with Dennis's fascination with water?); it is, however, an entertainingly piece of trash, a sick little psycho flick with a wonderfully over-the-top performance from Ted Raimi, and solid support from Lake and Lords, the latter channelling Meiko Kaji and Christina Lindberg for her role as a vengeful junkie on a mission.

The film also features an impressive moment of graphic flaying (courtesy of KNB effects group) that is guaranteed to please gore fans: Skinner slices open his victim's back, works the skin loose, rolls the body over and yanks the skin down off the face (be sure to watch the uncut version of the film: there's an iffy copy on YouTube that is missing this splattery scene).

6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for the delectable Ms. Lords, who doesn't get nekkid (for a change), but is still very hot (it takes more than a few scars and a lack of hair to stop her from being sexy).