Gabriel Bartalos’ directorial debut began as character sketches that morphed into a nightmarish world tailor-made for its horrific family
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is rightfully credited as a film that changed the course of horror cinema. For my money, it is the greatest horror film ever made, and logic dictates that it will not be unseated any time soon, if ever. Hooper famously did not want a sequel to his masterpiece. But when he finally gave in he delivered the self-destructive The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), a film that Bennett Glace explores in depth here on Split Tooth and calls “a neon-lit shot of adrenaline.” Glace recommends watching it on an empty stomach. In it, the Sawyers have become a champion barbecue family that swears the secret to their chili is “the meat.” They live beneath the Texas Battle Land amusement park that depicts famous Texan conflicts, and Leatherface falls in love. Oh, and Dennis Hopper spends half the movie slinging dual chainsaws. It’s a movie that uses comedy and overstimulation to be horrific as much as traditional elements of horror. It is a truly unique film that today stands tall among Hooper’s body of classic works — a reputation that has changed since many early viewers saw it as, at best, a head-scratching follow up that collapsed the franchise.
From 2004, Skinned Deep shows what happens when a movie embraces The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as if it, not the elder sibling in the franchise, is the world-bending horror film. Skinned Deep makes no effort to hide the Sawyer family’s impact on its surroundings, from its dusty landscapes, to its putrid home furnishings, to its awful family meals. Here, the hostile family operates its death factory across the street from a roadside diner, complete with underground tunnels, a dining room from hell, and a lab full of monstrous creations. Much like the Sawyers in Chainsaw 2, the family itself is as funny as it is frightening. Granny (Liz Little) is in charge of public relations. Her job is to show faux hospitality to lure unsuspecting victims into their trap. Her housemates then waste no time showing off their unique skills. The Surgeon General (played by Aaron Sims and Kurt Carley), who embodies both Leatherface and Predator with a razor-toothed faceplate, is the killing machine at the crux of the film. Warwick Davis is Plates, a white-jumpsuit-wearing maniac with a penchant for poetic ramblings, whose weapon of choice is a well-thrown porcelain plate. Then there’s Brain, or Brian (Jay Dugré), who has an enormous external brain and a gentle but misguided heart. As a group, they’re a deadly force that loves killing for sport.
In an interview included on the Severin Blu-ray, director and renowned makeup artist Gabriel Bartalos says Skinned Deep started with the creation of the family. He had these fascinating characters and began to create a world where they all lived. Soon the little details, such as the Surgeon General’s look, which he describes as beginning with the idea of a skull with a bear trap for a mouth, morphed from defining visual elements into the story itself. Bartalos asked a weapons expert to design the Surgeon General’s weapon of choice, and he came back with a blade that aped his profile, metal teeth and all. Warwick Davis is, without question, the biggest name involved in the film (Skinned Deep was released between the third and fourth Harry Potter films, in which he plays Professor Flitwick). They met when Bartalos was a makeup artist for Leprechaun, of which Davis plays the titular role. They grew close when spending hours together applying Davis’ intricate costume. With the villains as the guiding light for the film, Bartalos then needed a story to let them show off their abilities in what became his debut feature film.
The story is simple but effective. A family of four on a roadtrip finds their luck has left them when they’re stranded with a flat tire. They stumble upon the diner and Granny kindly invites the family to her house while they wait for help. The road trippers find they’ve made an incurable mistake. The father tries to calm the family by telling them it’s just a regular old house, but they all see they’ve entered a barely disguised death trap. The house is brilliantly decorated with knives on the walls, lamps that can only be made of things that once breathed, and various objects dangling from the ceiling at too-low levels. Everything in the house has met its final resting place. The son, Matthew, tries to play a video game, but the TV won’t turn on because the back has been hollowed out and houses strung-up dolls. They gather at the dinner table and quickly offend their hosts. The daughter, Tina (Karoline Brandt), declines the food on the grounds that she’s a vegetarian and won’t eat anything that once had eyes. The Surgeon General, sitting in the corner and wearing the face of last night’s victim, lashes out when the mom takes a flash photo of him. Shot through a fish-eye lens, the Surgeon General blasts out of his chair and makes quick, blood-spurting work of both parents. When in action, he is an ominous presence, always filmed to maximize his foreboding figure. The best example of the film’s blend of horror and dark comedy is when the Surgeon General slices Matthew in half, whose last words are, “You missed,” before splitting into two even pieces. The Surgeon General is left standing in his place in the frame.
Brain begs Granny to spare Tina, and his courtship forces her into nightmarish set pieces. She’s held in a room that’s covered from floor to ceiling in newspapers, an absolute nightmare of claustrophobia. So much in that room is shot in painful closeups with either over-the-shoulder perspective shots, or with a camera hovering inches from Tina’s face. Every bead of sweat is captured, and the angled framing adds to the anxiety-ridden nature of the location. Despite Brain’s generous offering of ring finger soup and money, Tina tears the newspaper off the floor and finds an escape hatch into underground tunnels. Everything looks like a melted candle beneath the house, and we’re best to only guess what smells are contained therein. The string lights give just enough of a glow to illuminate some of the film’s most depraved visuals. Blood-soaked toys litter the path. A snake crawls out of a skull. Home videos from past victims play on an unwatched TV. For a film that was created to showcase characters, the set design rises to match the pillars of the film. This hellish family could only reside in a hellish environment.
Since the first visitors are quickly eliminated, a second set of victims is required to cross paths with the family. A senior motorcycle club, who call themselves the Ancient Ones, stops for coffee at the diner. One falls for Granny as she lays the charm on heavy. He stays behind to chat as the rest of the group skips out for a barbecue down the road. His courtship is cut short as Tina finds her way out of the tunnels and begs him for help. Of course, the Surgeon General, with a great slow-motion leap, arrives in time to recapture Tina. The Ancient Ones return at night to find their friend’s bloody jacket and vow to exact revenge.
The rest of the film is a confident teeter between absurdity and sincerity. Great monster movies need to highlight the monster, and in each of the Surgeon General’s attacks he provides another reason for why the film was made. Plates has less tricks up his sleeves than the Surgeon General, but he’s an excellent foil as the motor-mouthed projectile expert to the General’s silent, close-range power. Brain steals the show multiple times. While trying to woo Tina, he takes her on a date to a park by the lake. He wears a feathered headdress with beads and plays her sweet harmonica riffs. They ride together on his motorcycle and he opines about wishing he could be more like his bike: perfect and with purpose. He then tells her he dreams of blending in with society, a world where he can be just a statistic, not an outlier. In the most bizarre scene of the film — and that’s saying something — Brain enters a dream sequence where he’s running through the streets of New York City, naked except for his running shoes. He feels the freedom of escape and being comfortable in his own skin. It’s an odd interlude that reinforces the comedic aspects while also being a semi-tragic vignette that pegs Brian as a character fated to a single dimension forever. What truly sets the scene apart is that visible just a few hundred feet away at the lake is a child’s birthday party, balloons and all, that was almost certainly not staged for the film. All these moments equate to the odd bending of reality that makes the strange parts feel so much weirder than they should and makes the should-be-conventional moments land just out of alignment. These moments of turbulence match the personalities of the family and foster the film’s environment.
So much of Skinned Deep reeks of the early 2000s. It’s certainly a time capsule piece in that sense, but despite using so many of-the-times techniques, the effects are employed to great effect. The fish-eye lens shots are particularly harrowing. As the Surgeon General pursues victims, his hulking frame grows more intimidating with the distortion of his body. It also relishes in closeups and perspective shots that let the set design maximize its grisly nature. At any point, this film could morph into a 2000’s heavy metal video, and Bartalos has indeed directed a few music videos that share this sweaty, grimy style, and that signature washed-out blue coloring. The world of Skinned Deep is just slightly askew of Earthly and lets little beats of reality skip, like when Granny opens the front door from ten feet away with her arms outstretched. She speaks like her dialogue is lost somewhere in the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks. Through it all, the camera pursues characters as if stalking them from close range, a lingering entity, or frames its targets at odd angles to emphasize the unnatural environments its subjects navigate.
Skinned Deep can be a tough sell if the only sales pitch is that it is entirely derivative of the Texas Chainsaws. But it makes no effort to hide that fact. It has been billed as a “Texas Chainsaw style comedy sci-fi horror thriller romantic drama” and confidently riffs on many of the best Chainsaw scenes, but it spins that inspiration into oblivion. Instead of a foreboding, BBQ-crazed father, the authority in Skinned Deep is a headless bodybuilder called the Creator. With his oily biceps and Dyno-mite!! loincloth (it’s literal), the Creator is the most puzzling figure in the film. He’s certainly some form of a deity capable of birthing intelligent life out of his chest, but we’re given no reason what he is or why he exists. He simply is, and it’s for the best. In contrast to the Sawyer family in the Texas Chainsaws, his business is creation, not protecting the bloodline of generations of bovine butchers. But like so many creators, his prized creations cause his downfall. Had they not taught Tina how to kill on a family initiation hunt, he may still be birthing killing machines in his lab, undisturbed.
Ultimately, what Skinned Deep shares with the Texas Chainsaws is that all three films know when and how to end. Sally Hardesty escapes Leatherface’s clutches, screaming all the way home, as he windmills his chainsaw until that harsh cut to silence. Stretch, the radio DJ who Leatherface falls in love with, takes down the Sawyers and the franchise. And though Texas Chainsaw 2 finds Stretch screaming and spinning with a chainsaw in hand, she ends the film in tormented triumph. Tina’s ending is far from the most iconic, but is certainly the most uncomfortable. Once her route to safety is foiled, she starts to scream as the screen cuts to black. Her screams become a haunting loop that lasts the duration of the credits. It feels like one of those jokes that goes on for so long it loses its humor before becoming funny again. But it doesn’t play only for laughs. It provides an odd timbre to end on. So many of the kills are comedic (the punted head, Granny’s explosive peace medals), but the film never loses its edge. The credits leave us in a strange point of tension. The screams have an allure that makes you want to stay to see if there is anything beyond the credits. Conversely, it creates a repulsive sensation that makes you want to flee the room. Sure, Sally escaped Leatherface, but the opening credits of Texas Chainsaw 2 inform us that she’s been institutionalized because of the trauma ever since. In that sense, Sally and Tina are sentenced to the same fate. They entered into madness by accident and will forever pay the cost.
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