No Sequel For You: Skeleton Crew (2009)

Skeleton Crew (Finland, 2009) (AKA "Snuff Massacre-Skeleton Crew")

Rating: *

Starring: Rita Suomalainen, Steve Porter, Anna Alkiomaa

I...This...*sigh*... Okay...

You know that feeling when your gut is telling you to stay away from something cuz they're acting up? Diarrhea-inducing gut feels? Sure you do. Well, I had six of them before I watched this movie and I completely ignored them. 

Why must I be so stubborn?

Skeleton Crew is a Finnish slasher movie that starts off with one of the longest opening murder involving a car-crashed couple taking in refuge in a mental hospital in the middle of the woods (as if there's not enough of those already), which turns out to be no more than a scene for another slasher movie currently being filmed by our real characters. Take note these false kills runs for a hefty length of thirty minutes. Thirty minutes. That's a lot of time wasted for a film that runs for an hour and a half.

So, it appears our crew is filming an exploited version of a true to life case about a mad doctor and his cohorts murdering their patients for snuff. After a few minutes of badly acted bickering and cartoonish pride, they find a hidden room behind a crumbling wall that contains the doctor's fabled snuff movies, something that slowly took over the director's obsession to the point he begins to abuse his production crew, up until he goes cuckoo enough to murder them in gorily inventive ways.

I could appreciate the film for gore alone, but everything else about Skeleton Crew is a joke; accented English aside, the cast either over or under-act their roles to a laughable point, bad enough that the film's snail pace tempted me to just skip to the gory parts which were, again, the only things I don't have much to complain about.

The key word is "much" though since while they're inventive albeit cartoonish, something most of us slasher fans would be looking for in a massacre, they had to ruin it with a lame and very confusing "twist" involving fourth wall breaching.

The net result is a movie that felt like a long walk to an unending abyss, finding nothing in the end but a very polished turd. It's nothing new and, if anything, it may have set Finland's credibility to create any effective horror film lower than it already is. A sad, desperate title made only for sad, desperate people. Watch at your own risk.

Bodycount:
1 male found disemboweled (film)
1 male hacked with an axe (film)
1 female tortured to death (snuff)
1 male had his legs set on fire, killed (snuff)
1 male repeatedly beaten on the face (snuff)
1 male flayed on the back with a whip (snuff)
1 male powerdrilled to the temple (snuff)
1 male tortured to death (snuff)
1 male tortured to death (snuff)
1 female had her tooth pulled out with pliers, killed (snuff)
1 male electrocuted with jumper cables (snuff)
1 female powerdrilled on the head
1 female gutted with a scalpel
1 male cut in half with a chainsaw
1 male hacked on the head with a nailed bat
1 male cooked alive with spotlights
1 male had his ear drums ruptured with high frequency pitch
1 male ran through with a spear-equipped dolly
1 female had her limbs amputated, bled to death
1 female burned alive with a blowtorch
Total: 20