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OK! As is the case with most of the horror movies that find their way onto my Netflix queue these days, Skinned Deep comes on the recommendation of Thor, or Zeus if we wanna go with current updates to internet monikers and all. What I know going in: It's a movie that exists for the sole purpose of letting a horror special effects guy go to town. Oh, and that the box/disc/menu art prominently features this guy who looks like mecha-mouth from Venture Bros. Information that probably doesn't help anyone, since he's one of those throwaways from prison.
We start off with someone getting some sorta body art done, while an old guy wanders around. By body art, I apparently mean burning SD into someone's skin, and the old guy actually looks a LITTLE like Doc Holiday. Not the cowboy, the jazz musician who caused one day of my life to be a Cosby Show episode. You know, "come down here and meet your uncle, the famous jazz musician!" Anyway though, SD there turns into the title of the movie, Doc gets in his car and drives off, when suddenly, mecha-mouth somehow ends up on the roof, stabs down with a big meathook, and causes a crash. Suddenly we start intermittently cutting away to extreme close-ups of some guy's oiled up beefy pecs and biceps. And yes, they are glistening.
So anyway, moving on, we've got a little montage of smashing out the windows of the car with the credits "and Warwick Davis as 'Plates.'" That'd be Willow if you aren't up on your names of B-movie big-names. So anyway, windows get smashed up, Doc Holiday bleeds, but isn't quite dead, we get a weird image of some giant old fetus man or something, and suddenly we cut away to a home movie being filmed of Rustic Bill and his wife Pearl Forester taking the kids on a road trip to "historic Oldtown, you know, where there's all that activity from the last century and all, and we're going to learn a lot about history and what made this country great." That's a direct quote right there. Also, Rustic Bill, amazingly enough, turns out to really be named Bill. It's not often that my arbitrarily assigned nicknames turn out to really be character's names like that. Neat.
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Anyway, they come across the gruesome wreckage from the previous night, where they're waved on by some Absurdly Suspicious Cops. Then they get a flat tire. Because Evil Mutant Mountain Men tossed a spike strip out in front of them. Anyway, ol' Bill he done wanders off to a nearby mom and pop convenience store to borrow a phone. Mom invites them to go to her house so her son can work on the car... and she does this with the sort of bad acting that's cheesy enough I'm forced to assume it's intentional. I doubt you'll find a GARAGE out here. Why don't you take your FAMILY and go to my house. My SON can work on your car. I'll be there in FIVE minutes. Find the EIGHT pieces LINK and save Hyrule.
So, Ma Foreshadowing's house is just, wall to wall potential gruesome murder weapons. This prompts Bill to say "it's just a normal house." Little Billy spots a working SNES hooked up the the TV and is immediately drawn to it, wandering away from the group and fiddling with the RF connector. Odds are this is dropping his survival rate, but who can resist the siren's call of the SNES? For the curious, yeah, modern movie. 2004. Anyway, further around the house, we've got ritualistically dismembered dolls, a big wall of creepy looking stuff labelled "Evidence" dry blood stains on the walls, and newspapers spread out all over. "I told you it was normal!" Seriously, this is the most obvious human-butchers' house ever, and Rustic Bill is perfectly at ease! Ma makes introductions. "This is the surgeon, Surgeon General!" Quick wave from a really really creepy old freak. Pearl seems legitimately charmed. "Hey, she's spoken for!" Then there's Plates, Mental Patient looking Warwick, complete with undone straight-jacket, "and here comes Brain with dinner!" Oh WOW. This is presumably making it into the screens when this is posted. He looks like Dana Carvey, in redneck suspenders-no-shirt combo, with a giant sack covering the bulk of what, presumably, is a head 10 times the size of a normal person's. He politely serves piles of raw meat to everyone. "Thanks Brain!" OK, I love Rustic Bill. It's a shame he's so obviously doomed. Daughter is being a snob. Anyway, Pearl starts taking pictures because this is such a happy dinner scene. Taking the picture of General Surgeon, who's sitting in the shadows for a reason offends him. Probably because he's Mecha-Mouth with Doc Holiday's face precariously balanced over his own as a grim mask of normality. Or maybe he's just shy. Either way, he gets up and slices Pearl's throat open with a mini-batlev.
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Rustic Bill isn't as relaxed about that as everything else, but still relatively calm as he decides to get up and run. So.... Plates starts throwing dinner plates at him Odd Job style. Hence the name, I guess. Daughter makes a run for it, along with Little Billy. Mecha-Mouth, who I'm just going to start calling Jaws, and Plates pursue. Jaws has silly robo-vision going on. OK. Plates here is just outright hilarious. As is Brain. Jaws swings what, seriously, has to be like the Klingon equivalent of a butter knife or something down at Little Billy, who retorts with "ha! You missed!" before splitting straight down the middle, having actually been vertically bisected. Brain begs for Daughter to be spared. So they toss Brain's sack over her (yes, exposing his gigantic exposed brain), punch her out, and take her home. Presumably Rustic Bill was killed at some point in all this. Shame. Anyway though, Daughter ends up in a room where all the walls and furniture are totally covered in newspapers. She discovers the only window is boarded up, blocked off with bricks, features thick iron bars, and has plywood nailed up. Eventually, she ceases her pretty impressive efforts to tunnel through. Oh, and her name is Tina. Brain comes to bring her some soup and money to eat. Soup with a finger in it, but really, he's so sweet polite and well-meaning! Seriously, this movie is great.
So anyway, Brain gives Tina some time to grieve, which she decides to instead spend burrowing through the floor papers to find a secret escape hatch. She must have some moleman ancestry or something. Anyway, while crawling through an escape tunnel lit by Christmas lights, she stumbles upon a bloody anthropomorphized M&M statuette, then plummets through a long shaft into the basement of horrors. Mainly skulls and chains. And a TV laying the home movies her family was recording earlier, being watched by a corpse. Grief ensues. Understandable. Her dad was awesome and all.
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Meanwhile, Bikers! After establishing Bikers, we return to Tina climbing out of the basement of horrors, passing her dad embedded in her wall, which doesn't bug her all that much compared to the home movies, go figure. Then it's back to... yeah. Yeah these are the bikers. OK. Imagine having a script that featured a rough and tough biker gang. Now imagine that a casting director made a horrible mistake, and transposed the actors set to play those bikers with the actors set to play the kindly old folks from a commercial for denture adhesive or something. And they ran with it. Anyway, it turns out the kindly old rough and tough bikers are literally riding directly over one hatchway leading into the network of gruesome basement tunnels connecting the house to the convenience store, where a couple of bikers are still hanging out. Uh... long story short Kindly Old Mr. Biker is killed. I still can't get over how weird it is whenever Ma talks. It's like, Tim and Eric levels of bad acting.
And uh... after this, Brain puts on his RIDICULOUS INDIAN HEADBAND takes Tina out on dead biker's bike for a nice romantic ride down to the lake to play the harmonica for her. He's still not getting why she's not happy with her new living situation, but I'm holding out hope for a happy ending with these two. Tina tries convincing him to leave his house of horrors with her and OK, I really can't concentrate on anything other than the hilarity of this headband.
Suddenly, the conversation fades out to a little fantasy sequence of Brain being so accepted by society at large that he can run naked through the city streets with happy music playing. So yeah, little bit of full frontal male nudity in there for the squeamish. Notice that this is a bit of the way in though, so I have broken the curse of the boob shot by paragraph 2. No wait, oily pecs. Forgot about that. Does it still count when it's a guy? Also, what the heck was with that anyway? Nobody thus far is nearly that buff.
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Anyway though, Tina has a dream about her family being alive and well, wakes up to see Suspicious Cop and Ma talking outside the window she actually managed to dig out a glimpse of daylight through. Meanwhile, the freakshow trio are off in a metal shop improving their battle gear. Plates is sharpening his weapons on a big honing wheel. Bear in mind his weapons are ceramic plates. Brain meanwhile is building a helmet. When finished, the whole fam comes to help get Tina into her wedding dress so she and Brain can get married. Brain puts on a nice jacket. Over his overalls and no shirt. Doesn't he know that it's bad luck to see his bride before the wedding? So yeah, once she's all dressed up, they strap her to the grill of their truck and- wait no. This is apparently some different group of weirdos with some different girl strapped to the grill of a truck. See, I was confused what with the bad lighting. No wait, wait. There's the family truck, then there's an unrelated truck full of drunk rednecks. OK. That's established now.
Anyway, the Fam's getting all battle ready. Time to engage the rednecks! Ramming speed everyone! The rednecks eventually swerve, losing the game of chicken, Plates attacks, and... yeah. We've got a truck full of mutants with a crazy midget on the roof hucking plates at a bunch of rednecks. Then Jaws tosses over a grappling hook so they can board them. Jaws kills himself some rednecks. You know, a small part of me would suggest I shouldn't be rooting for the evil murderous freak family, but they're just so astoundingly likable! Honestly, that's not even true. I'm 100% behind'em here if we're going to be honest about it.
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Plates eventually gets down to the last redneck, and gives him this great big cheesy speech, getting all poetic about his porcelain plate and how it's a metaphor for life. Redneck sez "... what the @$#% is wrong with you?" Jaws takes Tina over to watch them torturing their final victim some and the DVD starts skipping! Quit that DVD! I'm liking this movie! Oh, and Brain is wearing his helmet now. Anyway, cutting to what I assume is a dream sequence, he's back to the headband of awesomeness, Tina's smiling at him like a lobotomy patient, and he's playing his harmonica for him, and apologizing. She's understanding of how this is the lifestyle they just kinda have to live by being deformed freaks, and starts trying to seduce him by pulling the feathers out of his headband. Actually, she's back to her whole "you don't belong with them" deal, so I guess this really is happening. This fails, so she rips a hole in the back of his head, causing the whole thing to rip open and spill out a bunch of children's letter blocks, which crawl across the floor and spell out the word love. OK, yeah, I'm back to dream sequence. She stomps on them, changing them to "hate" while Brain coughs up Ecto-Cooler-green blood. Then she wanders out.
Meanwhile, the kindly old rough and tough bikers return, seeking revenge. Let's see, we've got Santa, we've got Desert Hat, we've got a cutaway to Plates balancing a pile of dishes unrealistically, we've got Specs, we've got Granny... Anyway, Ma comes out to meet them, and gives them little metal peace symbols to stick to the heads of Santa, Desert Hat, and old-Ted-Raimi, meanwhile Granny let's a chain slip out her sleeve, getting ready to throw down. Turns out the actual names of the bikers are things like Pig Pen, Big Joe, and Salmon. Dang, wish I hadn't started giving them my own names now. Desert Hat says "$@#% peace! Give war a chance! Then pulls off his peace symbol, just before Jaws hits the detonation trigger on it. So, yeah. Heads explode. The shock of seeing this also causes a heart to explode (seriously, there's this silly zoom-in shot of it. Plates comes out to finish someone off, prompting survivors to go "He had his whole life ahead of him!" Prospector takes off his shirt and gets ready to throw down as some more hilarious dialog is exchanged. It's basically just him and Granny left. "YAAAR!" goes Prospector, being goaded into combat by Granny, and suddenly he's chasing a terrified Plates through the cactus field! Oh no! He's out of plates! Hooray! He had some hidden in the dirt! Down goes Prospector, and Plates starts doing a very silly and elaborate victory dance. Turns out he's still alive though! He grabs the plate that stuck him, and smacks Plates across the face with it, then tackles him and starts pummeling him. I should probably point out if it wasn't clear that this is a decrepit 70 year old geezer wailing away at a midget. Then he rips his head off, drinks his blood to gain his power, and tosses it aside, where it hits the roof of a passing car on another happy family. Triumphant, Prospector gives his lady a kiss, and they walk off into the sunset.
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Meanwhile Tina, remember her? The token boring normal character? She's wandering through what's apparently the mad science lab where The Creator, uh, created all the freaks. It's full of slimy tanks, and steamy pipes, and goldfish flopping around on the floor the mumbly Creator! Turns out he's the buff oily dude from earlier. Also, he has no head. Like, Headless Body of Agnu no head. He has a wrestler's belt that says DYNO-MITE! on it. Wow.
Ma comes along and plugs some tub into the dataport in the back of her neck, for some reason. Tina kinks the tube up to ask uh... nothing important really, before breaking it and thus killing Ma... somehow. It's intentionally ill-explained. But I guess severing her refueling tube causes her to melt all Gremlins style. The Creator starts giving this weird holier-than-thou speech about the violent nature of humanity, but he's REALLY mumbly and it's hard to make him out. Then his chest opens up to reveal that, well, he's basically Krang. Or he can just spontaneously generate weird little midgets within his torso and chuck'em at people. I think it actually is the second one from context. Anyway, TINA SMASH, in general, while The Creator is all horrified, and/or exhausted from throwing a baby at her, and lays down for a bit. She's swinging a big pipe around at everything in the room.
Then in comes Jaws, I guess to save the day. He goes to bite her head off, but she parries with Krang-baby, then kicks him into some conveniently exposed electrical wiring. She then takes some REALLY conveniently placed dynamite with 3 minute timers and casually arms and drops it upon the unconscious bodies of Creator and Jaws before running. Jaws gets up and pursues, dynamite still kinda taped to his torso. Tina dives through a door to where 1000 or so axes seem to be nailed to the exterior wall. Jaws meanwhile, explodes. Doesn't really effect him much at all though really. Just tears his cool trench coat a bit. He comes out, Tina gets on Brian's motorcycle and prepares to ram him. He silently begs for mercy, and...
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Sudden dream sequence! Her family appears with sparkly harp music and doves and bunnies to tell her she doesn't have to kill poor jaws in harmonious voices. Seriously. She says "%@#$ it." and runs him over anyway. A flaming robo-hand twitches on the ground. Another dream sequence! Her on her first tricycle! NOW she leaves. Oh, and the other dynamite explodes, taking the whole house out. Tina, who does not have the right to live through the movie AT ALL at this point, goes to the sheriff's office. The one with the Really Suspicious Cops. Eventually, it sinks in for her just HOW suspicious they are. We're talking as suspicious as the decor of the house here. So the sheriff opens a box containing a big nasty blade and grins menacingly. Then the credits start rolling. Also, Tina starts screaming "NO!" in a really really loud and annoying fashion. Like, the entire time the credits are rolling. It's actually really annoying. The ENTIRE TIME the credits are rolling. One would assume eventually she'd, you know, die, or run or something, but "NOOOOOOOO! No no NOOOOOOO!" Deep breath. "NOOOOOOOOOO!" etc. etc. Not like these are short credits either. Let's see.. we're up to catering now, animal trainer.... there's some really funny stuff in these credits actually. The biker gang for instance is officially called the Ancient Ones. Oh SHUT UP AND DIE ALREADY TINA! Please! Apparently she doesn't though, still screaming as the credits fade out.
So yeah. OK. The whole blocks spilling out of the giant head thing? That really happened. And now that I'm watching the special feature (just the one, a making of deal) the whole bit of Brain running naked through Times Square? That uh... really happened. To clarify, the actor was arrested for public indecency after running through a crowded street in broad daylight wearing only a giant prosthetic brain. Also, do we really need to focus so much on that scene for this feature? I mean, I have seen an AWFUL lot of penises flopping around this year. OK, we've got this, we've got Watchmen, we've got the 3rd season of Venture Bros. on DVD, I saw Basket Case not too long ago, which had a similar scene to this one here, then there's the Feast movies... come to think of it, I wound up watching the first episode of Boondocks with someone recently too. Oh, and we can't forget the third Reanimator ending with a rat wrestling around with a severed zombie wang... or that South Park episode it presumably inspired. I'm just glad I haven't been renting all of these. "Based on your recent viewing habits, Netflix has created this category just for you!"
