Skip to main content

Skinamarink


Skinamarink is the latest indie horror film that it seems everyone is increasingly talking about. It was made by a guy named Kyle Edward Ball, for a budget of $15,000. Several people posted TikTok videos praising this film to high heaven, saying it was the scariest film they had ever seen, etc. I went ahead and watched it last night. It felt like an anolog horror/creepypasta fever dream. In some ways effective, in other ways, not so much.









The premise of the story is simple. You see several shots of the inside of a house. None of the characters are really shown on screen, you mostly hear them talking, or see low angle shots of them walking or the backs of their heads. The 2 young children are Kevin and Kaylee, and you overhear the father talking on the phone with the kids' mother about an injury Kevin got when he fell while sleepwalking. Then the kids wake up in the middle of the night to find the parents are gone, and the doors and windows have suddenly vanished. They decide to go downstairs and watch some old cartoons on TV. From there, things begin to slowly get creepy.





The film is very experimental, with grainy quality camera shots, the audio is heavy, filled with static and distortion, and several scenes of whispering or garbled dialogue, sometimes subtitled, other times not. While some scenes are effective, including one where the little girl Kaylee follows what appears to be her parents voice upstairs, too much of it's 100 minute runtime is filled with scenes of walls, ceilings, doorways, etc, with nothing really happening. You'll get a potentially interesting development, then 10 - 15 minutes of nothing interesting happening, followed by tension build up and a jump scare (loud noise and a quick image), followed by another several minutes of nothing. It felt like a short story idea that was stretched out to over an hour and a half, and it suffers because of that. It does a great job of capturing the feeling of being in a nightmare, with it's non-linear story telling and refusal to follow a basic plot structure. It's just too bad that the creepy scenes and tension aren't consistent, forcing you to sit through a lot of random shots of the house’s interior.





Skinamarink is bound to be a divisive film among horror fans. Some will praise it's effective, creepy atmosphere, others will be confused as to what all the fuss is about and find it an extremely pretentious borefest. While I have enjoyed plenty of abstract art films (Under The Skin, the movies of David Lynch, The Double Life of Veronique to name a few), I found this one to be overrated. I got what the filmmaker was going for, but it falls short. A few creepy scenes ruined by too many shots of random objects that kill the mood and take you out of the story, leading to an anticlimactic end. It should have been a 30-35 minute short. Ultimately a good premise with flawed execution.







 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Help Me… I’m Possessed (1974) / #Missingcouple (2024)

I've watched some weird, obscure horror movies throughout my life. I can now add this lurid 1974 schlockfest to that growing list. In a castle in the desert, Dr. Arthur Blackwood runs a sanitarium filled with mentally disturbed patients (as well as staff). He claims to be working on finding a way to cure people of any violent tendencies they have, and brags about his younger sister, innocent, child-like Melanie, as evidence that his treatment works. When she was a child, their parents had to keep her locked up and chained in the basement, to control her violent fits. Now that he's cured her, Arthur has his wife Diane come to the castle to meet Melanie, so that they can be one big, happy family. Diane begins to grow suspicious that something is amiss after a Sheriff shows up investigating the murder of 2 local teens, and sets about on her own investigation, hoping to uncover the sinister secrets that she feels her husband is hiding. Help Me... I'm Possessed is an outrageous,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Titanic Creations Yongary 1967

This figure was released in late December, and I got it about 2 days before the New Year, so I'm counting it as a 2025 release. It is the Titanic Creations version of the Korean kaiju Yongary, Monster From The Deep. The film was released in 1967 as a Godzilla ripoff, with several ideas copied from the Gamera series, such as his tusks, his ability to fire a stream of flames from his mouth, and even firing a laser beam from his horn, similar to the slicing one used by Gyaos. The film is pretty goofy, but Yongary, like most of those Asian monsters, was pretty cool (to me, at least), so I was psyched that someone finally made a figure of this lesser known kaiju. When Titanic Creations put it up for pre-order, they announced a series of tiers, where they would add accessories when a certain number of orders were met. Enough fans ordered him, so that Yongary ended up with a shit ton of stuff, making him absolutely worth the price. In addition to the kaiju, you get a flame breath effect, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

RicSan Custom Toys Kyōrū Kaiju (Titanosaurus)

My latest kaiju figure purchase is the Titanosaurus made by Ricsan Custom Toys. I own and love the Varan & Gabara, so of course I had to preorder this one when it was available. He was delivered earlier this week. This kaiju hails from the last Godzilla film of the Showa era, 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla. The Black Hole aliens are back, rebuilding their robot in another effort to take over the planet. They enlist the help of an ostracized Earth scientist named Mafune and his daughter Katsura, who are able to control an aquatic dinosaur named Titanosaurus. They plan to use both kaiju and mecha to attack Japan. Titano was a cool monster, with his tail that opened into a fish fin, and he would use it to create whirlpools in the sea, and high winds on land. I'm hoping that S.H. Monsterarts makes one for the 50th anniversary of the film, but when I saw this Ricsan Custom version, I couldn't pass it up. Titanosaurus (called the Kyōrū Kaiju), comes in a white box, with its n...
Post a Comment
Read more