Here’s a quiz for you. Let’s say you’re driving across the country on vacation, and your vehicle breaks down. You limp into a ramshackle country store and are greeted by Granny (Liz Little), the creepy old woman who owns the place. She invites you to stay for dinner, and, not wanting to be rude, you accept. Once you and your kin are seated and ready to eat, Granny introduces you to the other members of her family.
First off, there’s Brain (Jay Dugre). He’s an average-looking guy except for that huge sack which covers his enormously oversized cranium. Then there’s Plates (Warwick Davis), a midget who dresses all in white and looks (and acts) like a junior-sized psychopath. Oh, and he likes to throw plates at people. And finally, sitting in a darkened corner, is a man introduced as the Surgeon General (Kurt Carley). You can’t make him out very well, but it sort of looks like he’s wearing someone’s face over his own. I’ll repeat that last part. He’s wearing someone’s face over his own.
Now for the quiz. At this point, would you:
(a) Be thinking to yourself how odd these people are and how you’d better watch out.
(b) Excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, then run like hell.
(c) Laugh like an idiot at all their charming backwoods antics, then start asking the guy in the corner (that’s right, the one wearing someone else’s face) lots of annoying questions.
If you answered (a) or (b), then you’d probably react like 99.9% of the population. But if you answered (c), well, you would be perfectly suited to be a member of the Rockwell family.
Thankfully, the mother, father, and younger brother of the Rockwell clan are dispatched very early on (in fact, during that ill-fated dinner mentioned above), leaving only teenage Tina (Karoline Brandt) to contend with the family of maniacs and fend off the romantic advances of Brain. Luckily for her, help arrives later on in the form of a gang of homicidal, geriatric bikers named The Ancient Ones (led, strangely, by old-school horror fanboy, Forrest J. Ackerman). And let me tell you something - nothing can beat the sight of an eighty-year-old biker ripping the head off of a man and being drenched in blood.
Skinned Deep is what I’ve come to expect from el cheapo horror films. Bad script. Bad acting. Bad everything. The only thing that even passes for average are the special effects, and this makes sense once you realize that the director (Gabriel Bartalos) has long worked in that field. Now that he’s got the directing bug out of his system, I hope he’ll go back to the land of prosthetics and squibs and stay there.
The movie attempts to be funny at times, but the Bartalos script is absolutely devoid of anything approaching humor. It doesn’t even have that so-bad-it’s-good quality. It’s simply bad. Your local community theater could do better. For that matter, you could do better with a few thousand dollars.
And I would especially like to express my disdain at the filmmakers for ripping off shots from The Road Warrior. Maybe they considered it an homage. I consider it desperation and lack of creativity. It’s annoying when Tarantino does it, and it’s even more annoying when someone of this ilk does it.
Skinned Deep had potential, but the whole project went horribly awry (probably from the moment that a printer spit out the script). You’ve been warned. View at your own peril. And, after reading this, if you still think you might rent this film, why don’t you just put five dollars in an envelope and send it to me? I deserve it more than the people who made this film.
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