Editorials
‘Skinned Deep’: One of the Most Bonkers Horror Films of the 2000s Is Now Streaming on Screambox
It was the week of Valentine’s Day in 2004. While young romantics everywhere were doing their best to be struck by Cupid’s arrow, Outkast released seminal classic Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Family Business was the small screen star while Todd Phillips released the pre-Hangover seventies reboot Starsky and Hutch. And against all odds, a strange little slasher-monster-science fiction movie found release. That gonzo movie was Skinned Deep.
Now if you watch Skinned Deep, you will spend the majority of the time (just like I did) wondering if you read it wrong that the movie was made in 2004. Yes, it is two decades behind us but Skinned Deep actually looks more akin to the shot on video films of the late eighties and early nineties. And director Gabriel Bartalos refused to let his microbudget hold him back.
Bartalos had existed in the horror scene for almost twenty years at the time, working make-up and special effects before he got a shot at his own flick. Bartalos got his start in Hollywood in 1986, working on Spookies, before going on to work with legendary horror directors on beloved cult films; Frank Henenlotter on Frankenhooker and Brain Damage, and Sam Raimi on Darkman, as well as providing make-up for nearly all of the Leprechaun films. Needless to say, heading into the 2000s, Bartalos had already shown he had a proclivity for the weird.
But none of his past work holds a candle to the surreal exotica that is Skinned Deep.
From the outside looking in, Skinned Deep is nothing all that original. It’s pretty much a major lift from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, following a family travelling through rural America that is captured and tortured by an odd clan of serial killers. It borrows a smidge from The Hills Have Eyes as well, giving us a version of a mutant family, while also leaning a bit into that Mad Max wasteland feel. The first thirty minutes of the movie, in particular, feel extra low budget and like a straight up ripoff of the Tobe Hooper classic.
But Bartalos is not here to drop something you’ve already seen in your lap. In fact, Bartalos pieces together one of the most wild, surreal, completely bonkers horror films of the 2000s. The family fronts a diner to draw people in that they then kill or experiment on; Granny is the mother figure who runs the diner; Plates (played by Warwick Davis) is a ghostly white plate-throwing maniac; Brain is a younger man with a massive skull and brain cortex; and Surgeon General is some amalgamation of a mutant monster and futuristic robot with a bear trap mouth. Yes. You read that right. Warwick Davis plays a character named PLATES who literally runs around with a backpack full of DINING PLATES to MURDEROUSLY THROW AT PEOPLE.
That is only the tip of the weirdo iceberg. ONLY THE TIP OF IT. The first half of this movie introduces these gonzo characters but does little else to really differentiate itself from its obvious influence. The super low budget leads to strange almost fever dream-like chase scenes through fog machine-covered forests in broad daylight and ’90s era camera shots and sets. Bartalos really uses his talents as an effects artist to his advantage to create some truly solid gore-filled kills but it’s the last third of this movie that will have you obsessed.
I don’t want to ruin things for you but here are some things that happen: a group of elderly bikers battles the murderous family; there is a vehicular fight scene made up of Surgeon General and five out of shape drunkards; a chase scene through a cactus field that involves hidden buried plates; and a decapitation and explosion scene that must be seen.
Bartalos went full tilt for this movie lost to time. It feels like it was plucked straight out of the eighties and dropped into our laps and it’s wild that in the same year that gave us films like Saw and Dawn of the Dead we also got this meager yet completely earnest attempt at something much more wild. Skinned Deep is like Grant Morrison wrote a movie that Bad Taste era Peter Jackson released under the Troma banner. Released on DVD by the now-gone Fangoria/GoreZone DVD label, copies can be found online, and Skinned Deep is now streaming on Screambox!
It must be seen to even be believed…
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on November 27, 2020.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
You must be logged in to post a comment.