Skinned Deep

Skinned Deep is a cheesy Texas Chainsaw Massacre rip off with a fair share of gore! It offers funny characters, a typical Texas Chainsaw Massacre rip off plot and an hour and a half of entertainment! Not only there is no nudity, there is also no sleaze climate. The story is about a family that consists of two fat parents, a young brother and a vegetarian older sister who happens to play the main role of the victim that is tortured by the typical deformed family! This deformed family consists of as usually one person who happens to be an old lady. This old lady also happens to be psychotic , but she looks normal, and a bunch of deformed bastards. One of those deformed bastards actually has a sensitive soul. Therefore, the girl victim takes advantage of his sensitive soul for her own survival interest. Later on, a bunch of funky old people declare a war on that deformed family who has killed their buddy. In a nutshell, I suggest you watch this cheesy flick if you enjoy b-grade cheese cinema! And no! It ain't so awful as the films produced by Troma!

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.

Gabriel Bartalos, his name only ring a bell as make up and special effects for the great movie Brain Dead by Kevin Tenney. You can find his name easily on movies in the genre but this was his first and last attempt of directing one. What a failure. It all could have been great but I guess he wanted to make a movie about a weird family like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre but what's this. A man with a head as big as whatever. Bad acting and sometimes it is really bad that it almost becomes a spoof. The use of the camera was always the same. Used a thousand times before. Completily zoomed out and then getting close to the action. Gives a weird effect but don't do it the whole time. And using smoke, nothing against it but if you see where it comes from, no no no. The best part is the slashing itself. The killing of the visiting family is well done but the rest of the movie, no acting. For example, when the girl is being tied together, she never screams. It's sad to see but it is also a fact to stay in your own territory.

Skinned deep, this is a masterpiece of bad movie making. To most people, saying that this movie is terrible would be an instant turn off but for me that just sounds like a dare. Enough, about this movie. Its sorta like Rob Zombie's house of 1,000 corpses... well, strike that, its exactly like house of a 1,000 corpses except they had a budget of like 8$. That's slightly unfair, because this did have the star power of Warwick davies. That may sound sarcastic but its not meant to be, Warwick rocks. It also has a guy called Surgeon General who happens to have the coolest mask i've ever seen and some headless guy wearing a belt that proclaims his crotch to be "Dyno-mite". Assuming your still reading this, which may be a mistake on my part, the movie is about a girl whose family is killed in the first 15 minutes of the movie, including her kid brother. Bravo to Skinned deep for breaking rules of killing kids in a monster movie. You should know, in case your mourning the deaths of these imaginary people already, each one of them had it coming. Seeing them die is the first of many oh so rewarding moments in this movie. that moment is in line with a naked man with a gigantic head runningdown a street and a fight between old people and the hick/monsterfamily who really just steal every scene they are in. No part of this movie is a let down, even up to the very end where the best song ever plays through the credits, by song, i mean a girl screaming for like five minutes. I can't urge you to see this any harder, seriously.

Once again, my assumptions couldn't have been more wrong! I really thought this movie would be worth the 5$ I spent on it, because it's the directorial debut of Gabe Bartalos; who happens to be the regular special effects guy of such brilliant directors as Frank Hennenlotter ("Brain Damage", "Frankenhooker") and Matthew Barney (the "Cremaster"-cycle). Well, "Skinned Deep" once more proves that people who're talented in the art of make-up effects don't necessarily make good directors, as Bartalos' own project is an irredeemable lousy gore-flick that hangs together by amateurism. The script, for starters, is highly unoriginal and just the umpteenth "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"-rip-off. But what really irritates about this movie is the total lack of coherence and the overload of stupidity. "Skinned Deep" revolves on a family of bloodthirsty lunatics that fill their days with killing tourists. Their latest preys are the Rockwells, but the multi-brained son insisted on keeping the teenage daughter Tina alive, and even to incorporate her as a crazy family member! So far, this seems like a reasonably normal horror plot but the depraved family also battles a gang of old and senile motorcycle hooligans as well as a jeep full of chubby woodchoppers, and this is where the absurdity really kicks in. A lot of retarded things are being said and done (ever heard a midget bringing ode to a plate?!?) and even the rather cool gory effects can't keep you interested. The acting is really atrocious and Bartalos' directing is incredibly incompetent. The Surgeon General-character is the only memorable horror villain of the family. He's an unearthly strong mutant with a razor-sharp metal jaw and goofy little sunglasses. Warwick "Ewok" Davis looks pretty imbecile as the pale-faced, plate-flinging dwarf and I don't even want to mention the elderly cast-members. If the acting skills of all these amateurs hasn't given you a headache yet, sitting through the end credits definitely will, as it just features girlish screaming for FIVE WHOLE MINUTES! Damned, girl! You could try, like many of my fellow reviewers apparently did, to look at "Skinned Deep" as a typical so-bad-it's-entertaining trash movie... That didn't work for me, though. It's just rubbish, period!