From producers J.R. (The Dead Next Door) Bookwalter and David (Nightmare Sisters) DeCoteau comes this sporadically entertaining low budget horror/action hybrid.
A crazy one-eyed killer named Crawldaddy (Mary Jackson from Exorcist 3) goes around in a van killing and skinning people with her two psycho kids Phink (the late Scott Spiegel) and Violet (Susan Rothacker) in tow. When their van breaks down, a kindly old mechanic (Lester Clark) lets them spend the night while he fixes their vehicle. Unbeknownst to their host, the houseguests murder a delivery boy and a Jehovah’s Witness right under his nose. When the killers eventually turn on the mechanic and his wife, it’s up to his ex-cop neighbor (Floyd Ewing, Jr.) to save the day.
Skinned Alive features some Raimi-inspired camerawork and editing (there’s even a scene in a cellar that’s reminiscent of the Henrietta fight in Evil Dead 2), which makes sense since Spiegel co-wrote Evil Dead 2. The gore is also decent as we get a machete through the chest, hacked off fingers, a gory bullet to the head, a body shot all to hell, gut spilling, a bayonet to the throat, and a bullet through the cheek. It takes a while before we finally get to all the skin cutting and peeling scenes though. While the effects of the actual flesh slicing are hit and miss, the reveal of the skinless corpse is effective.
All of this is kind of fun when it’s focusing on the family of crazies terrorizing people, but the whole thing more or less stops on a dime once the focus switches to the alcoholic neighbor/hero character. The stuff with his cheating wife and her scumbag lawyer just slows things down to a crawl(daddy) and the odd comic relief sound effects are really out of place with the scenes of divorce and substance abuse. In fact, the overuse of humor throughout is more of a hindrance than anything. The filmmakers treat the gags almost like a crutch. It’s like they thought they could let themselves off the hook for the amateurish production values of no one took it seriously.
Spiegel is good though. He seems to be having fun, despite the uneven material, especially during the climax. Rothacker is amusing too. She gets a memorable scene where she performs a striptease for her brother where she cuts her clothes off and incorporates flayed skin in her act. Too bad the rest of the cast overact and/or are kind of annoying.
Clips from this later turned up in Bookwalter’s Shock Cinema series.
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