Without ever having heard about this 2024 horror movie titled "Skeletons in the Closet" from director Asif Akbar, of course I opted to sit down and watch it, given my love and fascination of the horror genre. And sitting down with zero expectations here, there was plenty of room for director Asif Akbar to impress me.
Ugh, the storyline was all over the place and nowhere all at once. It felt like writers Joshua A. Cohen, Terrence Howard, Mira Pak Howard and Koji Steven Sakai were writing stories independently of one another without talking together at all, then collectively handing in four scripts for director Asif Akbar to try to piece together like a puzzle to form a coherent storyline and make a movie. It just didn't work.
I have to say that I found the storyline in the movie to be really bad. The stories of Mark (played by Terrence Howard) and Valentina (played by Valery M. Ortiz) just didn't really have anything to do with one another. It was like watching two different movies layered over one another, with neither of them making much sense as it was befuddled by the other storyline.
There are so many things in the movie that serves the narrative absolutely no purpose, such as the scarecrow scene and the scene with the loanshark.
The movie actually has good cast ensemble, with the likes of Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Louis Mandylor and Udo Kier, to mention the most recognizable of the actors and actresses that participated in the movie.
Most of the times when they cut from one scene to another, the cut was accompanied by a loud noise and a flash of color. Going for some cheap jump scares, and it just grew tiring rather early on in the movie, and yet it continued on throughout the entire movie.
Yeah, "Skeletons in the Closet" was a swing and a miss of a movie, and I was struggling to sit through it, coming very close to giving up entirely around 55 minutes into the boredom that was the storyline in the movie. But I endured and sucked it up, soldiering on and actually finishing the movie. Was I impressed by "Skeletons in the Closet"? Not even remotely.
If you enjoy horror movies, do yourself a favor and don't waste 92 minutes of your life sitting through this.
My rating of "Skeletons in the Closet" lands on a generous two out of ten stars.
