Cinema #89: Skinamarink

Hey There,

Let me just preface this, with DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME seeing this movie. It is genuinely awful. Boy Wonder and I went to see this last week. We were excited because we love horror films, and Shudder normally NEVER lets us down, but boy how!

Not only were we disappointed but so were the other 12 people in the theater that watched it with us. The Trailer does a very good job of showing you what this film could be about. The trailer presents Skinamarink as perhaps a haunted house, or a possessed house interested in keeping the children close.

The film does nothing of the kind. My number one gripe about Skinamarink is its sound engineering. It was difficult to hear anything. The music, the conversations between the adults, or even the children. While it did come with subtitles, they were not present for everything. So you missed out on what I assume are important pieces of conversation. The music and sound effects were all over the place, sometimes painfully loud and then annoyingly soft.

After an hour and forty minutes, you should have some semblance of what the film is about, but I honestly can’t tell you. Either a coherent plot didn’t exist, or it was too pretentious for me to get it. When the film ended for what I thought was the third time, I was left so annoyed and confused, that I turned to the theater audience and asked out loud if I had missed something, the laughter and heavy nodding let me know I wasn’t the only one.

From what I can tell, the film follows two siblings, Kyle and Kaylee ( I think) who wake up to no parents in the home and don't know where they are. These children are left to their own devices in the house but feel a presence that isn’t their parents. After (what I think) multiple days, they begin to worry when they cannot find their parents and have not heard from them. These children are young, I guess younger than 8.

The presence moves doors, windows, and even toilets. It turns on and off lights and electric devices, making loud screeching noises (for some reason unclarified). That’s all I can tell you about this film without spoiling the few parts that were even worth anything.

I love horror films. I love good ones and cheesy ones. I even love the bad ones that you laugh at. However, Skinamarink is none of these. It felt like a college student film; if I were the professor, I would have failed it. It was just so long and so full of nothing, I felt cheated. Maybe IFC Films and Shudder saw something that we didn’t, but I don’t think the effort should be wasted to find it.

Until next time,

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