# Skinned Alive (1989)

### reviewed by
Brian Matherly

    Skinned Alive (1990)
    Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5.0 stars

Cast: Mary Jackson, Scott Spiegel, Susan Rothacker, Floyd Ewing Jr., Lester Clark, Barbara Katz-Norrod, Jon Killough, J.R. Bookwalter Written and Directed by: Jon Killough Running Time: 78 minutes

Crawldaddy (Mary Jackson) and her children Phink (Scott Spiegel) and Violet (Susan Rothacker) travel the highways and byways in their mobile tannery, skinning people who get in their way for use in the products they make. When their van breaks down, they are invited to spend the night with the friendly mechanic Tom (Lester Clark) and his annoying wife Whinnie (Barbara Katz-Norrod). Tom and Whinnie have no idea that their guests are cold-blooded murderers, but Tom's neighbor Paul (Floyd Ewing Jr.), an ex-policeman kicked off the force for mistakenly shooting a Hispanic woman in a junkyard (which led to him becoming an alcoholic and also forced his bitchy wife to divorce him), starts to suspect that things aren't right with Crawldaddy's clan.

Skinned Alive is an ambitious but ultimately insufficient film (that owes more than a simple debt to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). There is a pervasive feeling throughout the film that it should be more epic than it actually turns out to be. Most of the action is localized to the homes of Tom and Paul and rarely ventures beyond that (save for a few scenes that take place on rural roads and in Tom's auto shop) and very few other people are shown except for the main characters and eventual victims of Crawldaddy's evil. I understand that this was a completely low budget film and locations and extras would be hard to come by, but I just couldn't help but feel there should have been more to the story. The ending is a real surprise though and was an incredibly gutsy move on the part of Mr. Killough.

The gore effects in the film are all well done though, and do lend a bit of authenticity to the film. Characters are impaled, shot, run over, and of course, skinned (although I don't recall ever seeing anyone actually skinned alive as the title suggests, even though it's really not made clear whether or not the Jehovah's Witness character played by producer J.R. Bookwalter is actually dead during his skinning scene). Except for a few shots of a "body" being cut into that look more like someone cutting into a birthday cake, the majority of the remaining special effects are decently done.

The cast is largely made up of stock actors and crew that should be familiar to anyone who has seen the films of J.R. Bookwalter, and the director Jon Killough even makes an appearance as a hitchhiker who becomes the film's first victim of Crawldaddy and her children. The most "famous" cast member though, is Scott Spiegel. Spiegel is best known for his co-writing credit on the cult favorite Evil Dead II and more recently as the co-writer/director of From Dusk till Dawn 2 (and he is also responsible for writing the universally panned Clint Eastwood/Charlie Sheen effort The Rookie!). Here Spiegel shows what he can do as an actor (a trade which he is not unfamiliar to) and turns in an eccentric performance as the unstable Phink. For most of the film he seethes and bares his teeth at the camera while hissing his lines in a performance that would give the slimiest person in the world a run for their money. (Note: See J.R. Bookwalter's film The Dead Next Door for the restrained side of Scott Speigel).

Skinned Alive is available on VHS from www.tempevideo.com in a special pre-release remastered version. A soundtrack is also currently available for the film. A DVD special edition is planned for the summer of 2000 featuring the shorter cut of the film with commentary by J.R. Bookwalter, cinematographer Michael Tolochko Jr., makeup effects artist David Lange, and Scott Speigel. There are also plans for the DVD to contain a deleted scene (added to the original feature to pad the film out to a feature length running time), behind the scenes footage, and an isolated score.

Reviewed by Brian Matherly - bmath2000@hotmail.com AOL Instant Messenger: Widescreen25 The Jacksonville Film Journal - http://www.jaxfilmjournal.com/

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