Customer Reviews

Skinned Deep

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

After reading several reviews praising this film, both here and elsewhere, I had to check it out. Luckily for me, I only rented this flick. However, I still feel the cost of the rental was a total waste.

Skinned Deep opens with a grisly death scene involving an older gentleman in his car on a dark, desolate road. From there, we cut to an entirely different scene and meet the Rockwell family of four, off on their vacation. When they get a flat tire and are forced to seek the help of some of the all-too-willing-to-help locals, things take a turn for the worst. As it turns out, the locals are one large family of mutants with a taste for blood and vengeance. Three of the four family members are quickly disposed of. When Brain, or Brian, a boy with a grotesquely large and exposed brain, takes pity on Tina, a teenage girl, the family decides that he can keep her. Brian begins to fall head over heels for Tina, and the family decides to incorporate her into their twisted, blood-thirsty clan. It's up to Tina to find a way out alive.

Skinned Deep comes off as a poorly done, bizarrely twisted Texas Chainsaw Massacre rip-off with a lot more gore. However, the mutants are extremely far-fetched, to the point of being laughable, and the effects and gore are as well. The acting is simply atrocious, with the exception of the part of Tina, Warwick Davis, and some of the smaller roles. The audio is positively horrible, and the script is no better. Though some of the ideas seemed somewhat original, the plot was too convoluted in places, and several tangents detracted from the uniqueness.

I've always loved a good horror film, even many low-budget ones, but this has to be one of the worst films I've ever seen. If you really must see this for yourself, then rent it, because Skinned Deep is certainly not worth the purchase cost.

Me and my friends are really into terrible horror movies, and this one had us rolling on the floor, our sides splitting open in pure, unadulterrated glee. This is one of the worst written, filmed, edited and acted movies i've ever seen, but what makes this movie spectacular is that through some fluke, all of this bad multiplies itself into a wonderful piece of comedy. In my opinion, the film climaxes when Brian, a lonely member of a sick family, has a day dream about running through new york city, completely naked save his large brain and work boots. We watched that scene through seven times and could not stop laughing. I highly recommend this film to anyone who has a sense of humor and an afternoon or evening to waste. Your life will never be the same.

The Rockwell family of four board their minivan and head cross-country through the desert for a family vacation. All is well until they get a flat tire and are forced to stop and find help. They end up in this little roadside diner where Southern hospitality prevails. The old pleasant lady working at the diner invites them over to her house for supper and the family accept. Big mistake. The house is occupied by a bunch of homicidal freakshows. Within minutes they slay the entire family leaving only teenaged Tina alive. They trap her in a small square room, making Tina wonder why she is being spared her life. Simple: They want to make her a part of their family.

Make no mistake about it: Skinned Deep is dirt cheap. The acting for the most part is horrendous, the audio quality is awful and the special effects are laughable at best. To illustrate how cheap the effects are: early in the movie there is a scene where a madman uses a jackhammer to smash through what is meant to be a car’s windshield. Closer inspection however shows that the jackhammer is really tearing through a sheen of cellophane wrap, you know the type we use to pack lunch sandwiches with! But director Gabriel Bartalos is clearly onto something bigger here. I’m not sure where or how he thinks up these things, but there is enough oddities and twisted situations to make anyone shake their head in disbelief. His house of horrors puts Rob Zombie’s to shame as do his freaks. We get a guy with a gigantic 2-foot-high brain on top of his head, a carnivore-like freak with hooks for hands, 3-foot-tall Warwick Davis and a mild-mannered grandma.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this kind of stuff before. Like many other modern-day horror flicks, Skinned Deep lifts heavily from classic 70’s horror such as TCM and The Hills Have Eyes. Other notable influences are The Road Warrior (!) and Mother’s Day. But trust me, you’ve rarely seen an imitation done as well as this one. What makes Skinned Deep so great? Oh, let’s see. First there’s the unrelenting pace that never lets up, then the ridiculous over-the-top gore squirting all over the place and other assorted wild absurdities that even a horror vet like myself had never seen before. If anything this movie is worth the price of admission just to see a makeup-free Warwick Davis hurling plates across a room while screaming at the top of his lungs and finishing it off with a celebratory jig. Priceless.

I can’t get over the fact that I managed to rent this baby at Blockbuster and in an uncut version no less! If you’re a b-movie fan who loves gore and offbeat humor you owe it to yourself to watch this. I even recommend buying the sucker. This is redneck horror at its best!

Skinned Deep (Gabriel Bartalos, 2003)

Gabriel Bartalos is usually a special effects guy. Gabriel Bartalos is usually a very good special effects guy. A roster of the films on which he's worked reads like a who's who of cult film, including Brain Dead, From Beyond, two of the Cremaster films, and Darkman, among many others. For all that, Bartalos has only made one attempt, to date, to jump over into the chair of writer/producer/director. Submitted for your approval is that attempt, the comedy Skinned Deep. To give you an idea, the movie starts out with what is, anecdotally, an actual scene of self-mutilation. It does get funnier from there.

Skinned Deep is the story of the weirdest family since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Most all of them are hideously deformed and pretty badly socialized. This is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as they keep to themselves and only the odd traveller disappears now and then. But things get complicated when Brain (Jay Dugre), one of the family, falls for one of the kidnap victims.

This movie is awful to the bone, but it's awful in so many wonderful, wonderful ways. Bad acting, worthless script, terrible pace, the works. But all of these things somehow come together to make for an absolutely hilarious experience a la Kingdom of the Spiders or Shriek of the Mutilated, except that this one was never meant to be taken seriously in the first place. As long as you're willing to not take it too seriously, you'll have a ball watching this. ** ½

The horror genre has always brought us movies that are recycled copies of something else. You sit down and you press play and you start to watch a movie and within the first 5 minutes find yourself going "Not again." People take a wrong turn somewhere and end up dying---
This movie breaks that horror cliché in many ways.

What starts off as a nice little trip for a family (mom, dad, brother, sister) quickly turns into a blood bath after they are a little to trusting of the locals (sorry no real spoilers here). Some decent acting by the actors (especially the girl who played the daughter and of course Marvin the depressed android from the new flick "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" he also did some little indi. flicks, you might have heard of them the "Leprechaun" series Warwick Davis) And some gore very reminiscent of a Takashi Mīke movie (especially Ichi the killer). Kudos to the special effects people as well as the sound engineer.

A movie with exploding heads, severed limbs, Warwick Davis in one of the most interesting fights I've seen in any horror flick and a cool character twist at the end, isn't all that bad in my opinion. Well worth the purchase price.

Yes, Skinned Deep has horror. Yes, it has blood. Yes, it is violent. So if you're a fan of smart and well done horror then you'll love this movie. But if you're not a horror fan or have problems watching violence you should see Skinned Deep anyway.

Why? Quite simply, Gabe Bartalos' directorial and writing debut is so mesmerizingly original and fresh that its intensity and unbridled exuberance reach places that few film makers can (save a Kubrick or Lynch). To simply call this a horror flick totally misses the point. Cinematic invention in overdrive is more like it.

Although Bartalos has earned his well deserved fame in the FX department (working on Matthew Barney's Cremaster series as well as several of the Leprechaun films and the awesomely huge dinosaur for Universal's Back to the Future -- The Ride) he is certainly up to the task of writing, directing and doing the FX for his own feature film. The FX remain key -- and impress as much as ever -- and Warwick Davis (of Willow) is absolutely riveting on screen as the maniacal plate throwing character Plates.

The humor is absolutely bent too. When I saw Skinned Deep as part of the "Another Hole in Head" Film Festival in San Francisco the audience went nuts laughing and applauding. It was amazing how people were so into it -- especially when Plates started to rifle porcelain dishes at his intended victims (yes, he usually hit them).

To be clear, this movie is not for everyone. But if you appreciate adventurous film making and have a well developed sense of humor, then Skinned Deep should be in your cart.

This wasn't even near good as a gore movie (I love gore movies and I like most of them). The person with the most dialogue was a midget who threw plates at people. The whole plot is ridiculous and the movies just simply horrible. Don't even give this a try.

This Horror movie stinks!!! It's nothing more then a cheesy Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. The cast is bland & forgettable. The acting is fifth-rate. The dialogue is lame and weak at best. While it doesn't shy away from the blood & gore,most of the killings are pointless. The plot makes little to no sense. The only cool factor in this ripoff is Warwick Davis aka The Leprechaun but he fails to help the film in the long run. The most annoying part of the film is the end credits becuase instead of music,we get 4 minutes of a girl screaming "NO NO" over & over again. I give this movie a 1 out of 10.

I saw this movie a couple of years ago and still think about the characters often. Skinned Deep is sophisticated redneck horror. Please make another film!!!Skinned Deep

This is the most fantastic movie of all time. Do not miss out.

"I thought you'd be hungry, so I brought some soup and money..."