Best movie of this year hands down!

hyped garbage

A Masterpiece!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Utterly dreadful. A pitiful slasher with no redeeming qualities. Drags on and on like a train wreck in slow motion and the acting is not camp, it's just plain bad. What is so unforgivable about this movie is that with all the ingredients: a derelict asylum and a lunatic movie director making snuff movies on the fly, its difficult to see how the makers could fail to make at least a halfway decent horror film. This one misses the mark by a mile. Spurious sex scenes and tiresome adolescent remarks about mainstream slashers such as Saw and Hostel weigh this plodding mess down even more. Only good as a cure for insomnia.

Skeleton Crew is set in Finland where a small film crew are making a horror film called Silent Creek about a doctor that worked in a mental institution who made snuff films by torturing & murdering his patients some thirty year previous. The film crew are actually filming in the same institution where the murders took place & while scouting the place out they find a hidden room with a projector & a stash of snuff films, the director Steven (Steve Porter) becomes obsessed with the films & watches them although the rest of the crew don't. The graphic snuff films seems to have an affect on Steven & he rewrites his film to include the murders of of his cast & crew as he intends to carry on the doctor's legacy & make his own snuff film masterpiece...This Finnish production was directed by Tommi Lepola & Tero Molin & is a bit of an oddity really, I can't say I particularly liked it but at the same time I can't say I hated it. The first thing that is very noticeable about Skeleton Crew is how long the script plays the film within a film scenario in the sense you actually think your watching the film as it's supposed to be but then someone shout's cut & it's revealed that the previous scene was itself a scene being filmed within the context of the film but here in Skeleton Crew the entire first twenty one minutes is played out like a proper film before the film within a film twist is revealed & afterwards you have to basically forget the entire first twenty odd minutes as the film proper then kicks in. The silly twist's don't end there though as the character's realise towards the end that they actually are character's in a horror film & all the silly unbelievable things that have happened before are just part of horror film rules, it's a really strange plot twist & revelation that the makers can't quite pull off, it's an interesting idea with amusing comic potential but the film takes itself very seriously & it's hard to do the same. At 90 odd minutes I could have done with ten minutes or so cut from it, the character's & especially some of the dialogue is really bad (I take it as a Finnish production the makers first language isn't English which explains the odd dialogue & strange delivery) although there's some decent gore & it does try to throw in some twist's & turns that with a better script could have made for an effective horror thriller & it's saying something when you think the film within the film first twenty minutes is better than the rest of it!The first twenty odd minutes is actually quite atmospheric & darkly filmed while the rest of it, the proper film as it were, lacks any of that atmosphere & feels far more routine. There's some decent gore here, a scalpel is plunged into someone's eye, someone's head is drilled, someones cut in half with a chainsaw, someone is impaled on a spiked lance & there's a fair amount of blood splatter. The film is not perfect with various people just disappearing (the nurse from the beginning & the guy playing Lisa's husband) & when the drill's are switched Bruce doesn't even notice how different they look before sticking it in a girls head?With a supposed budget of about $1,000,000 this looks pretty good, well at least the first twenty minutes do while the rest of it merely looks alright. Apparently shot entirely in Finland with a mostly Finnish cast & crew, I can't say I can ever remember seeing another Finnish horror film actually. The acting is often very bad, some of the accents, bizarre emphasis on random word & the way sentences are constructed give Skeleton Crew a somewhat surreal feel that I quite liked in an odd way.Skeleton Crew really isn't very good with a couple of poorly handled plot twist's but I thought it tried & there's a few decent gory moments here & a bit of unintentional comedy value too with the bizarre dialogue & acting. I can't really recommend it but I didn't hate it.

film crew making a film about a snuff film maker and serial killer from 30 years before finds that someone is killing them off and filming the gory happenings. The often stunning visual sense of the film is what keeps this film afloat even as the plot drops into cliché. The problem with the film is that the plot really doesn't do anything you haven't seen before. After a too long opening sequence of past events, something that turns out to the film being made, the film more or less becomes the tried and true story of the film crew being hunted by someone either in the building or among them. Its not badly done, but its not a story that has any new twists and turns. The real problem with the film is that there are numerous WTF moments as the film kind of does completely illogical things (I mean beyond not packing up and leaving). At one point some of the crew finds footage, actually an earlier sequence in the movie, that is suppose to be something the killer shot. How it was possible is not explained and it really strains credibility. Good enough to recommend with reservations, its the sort of thing that will entertain its intended audience, but not likely to win many converts outside of it.

The tag line for this offering from the bowel of Satan is 'There's no sequel for you'; and trust me…if you have the balls to stick with this pile of steaming poop through to the bitter end, you'll thank all that you hold to be holy that there won't be.I don't know where to start really. The plot is the most contrived that you'll ever wish to see in and grade F movie…I won't even dignify this with the honorific of a 'B' movie…that would be an insult.Basically a film crew turns up at a derelict Asylum somewhere on the border of Russia…it never really explains the location…where 30 years previously a demented doctor decided to go into the film making business by turning out his own snuff movies by using the inmates as his cast. The erstwhile medic then disappeared taking the majority of his footage with him. The modern day crew turn up to re-create the events in a schlock horror movie.The plot then, of course, is totally predictable as the new director assumes the mantle of his real-life predecessor and starts joyfully killing off the cast and crew in various horrific ways.Let me talk for just a moment about the actor who portrays this new and improved homicidal maniac; I feel he has to have special mention, although there is plenty of guilt to go around. His name is Steve Porter. Don't bother getting too attached to his performance, which is the most wooden one I've seen since Pinocchio, as I can almost guarantee after this movie we won't be seeing him again…unless it's on his mug shot as he is led away by the police after being arrested for crimes against the viewing public. I mean, he can't help looking like a refugee Amish extra from 'Witness'…I won't hold that against him. But why the hell does he have to deliver every line like he's an alumni from the William Shatner school of acting? He was awful. The stick up his ass looked like it had a stick up its ass. His manic eye-rolling teeth-baring performance as an insane killer was silly to the point of being ludicrous. I cringed as I watched it, but for all the wrong reasons. It wasn't fear it was embarrassment.Finnish director Tommi Lepola who also made that unforgettable 2003 classic Kohatalon Kirja (aka 'The book of fate'…remember that one? Of course you don't!) puts the action together in a totally lackluster way…you can almost feel his desperation in every scene as he quickly comes to the inescapable conclusion that he is working with the absolute WORST bunch of actors, writers and continuity people since the immortal Ed Wood graced the silver screen and tries to salvage something from this rapidly sinking tugboat of a movie.But despite all their combined efforts…or perhaps because of them…the end product had the inevitability of a low speed car crash.Lepola also seems to have a predilection with actresses with large butts. It was almost like you couldn't act in his movie unless your ass reached a certain weight; it was quite Bizarre. All I have to say on that particular subject, is some people should definitely wear clothes. Or at least underwear that actually fits. It really did add insult to injury.Suffice to say, that the cast ran the gamut of emotions from A to…well… to A really.Skeleton Crew was bad. Not just bad in the conventional sense as in badly written, acted, or directed…but unwholesome like biting into a rotten apple or taking a mouthful of sour milk. It was violence and gore, for the sake of it…gratuitous lesbian sex that had NO real relationship to the plot, other than trying to appeal to people's baser instincts. All in all it left a nasty taste in my mouth.I now live in mortal dread that any of these people involved would ever option one of my own stories for the movie rights.Avoid this awful rubbish like a dose of terminal hemorrhoids, unless you really are, like me, in pursuit of the worst horror movie ever made!