0/10 I’m not sure which particular sin(s) I committed to deserve such torture but God punished me by unfortunately not letting me get into a horrific car accident on the way to the theater and instead let me watch not just the worst movie of 2023, not just the worst 0/10 score I’ve ever given (along with the likes of 2019’s “Black Christmas”, “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” and “Unfavorable Odds”) but the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life. I’ve watched tens of thousands of films and movies in my 34 year lifespan and seen some truly horrendous crap, many coming from the horror genre. “Skinamarink” (even the title is stupid and sounds like the name of a nude skating rink in Portland) takes the cake. The fact that it has a 71% on Rotten Opinions and that I’ve read people who were scared of this movie makes me lose what little hope for humanity I had left. Seriously, if Russia wants to nuke America at this point…go ahead. We seriously deserve it. I’m not sure if “Skinamarink” or pedophilia is the worst evil to come out of Hollywood. My God, where do I begin? The premise officially reads, “Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.” It sounds creepy on paper, like it could have potential to be interesting. How wrong I was to think that. For starters the movie takes place in 1995 but is shot with a handheld camera that is so grainy with background static that you’d think this was supposed to portray the early 1970s. Why not place the movie in the 1970s if you wanted this aesthetic? The 1930s cartoons that play on the TV would have even made sense in terms of time period. Why put it in 1995 but not use 1995 era cameras and sound? This alone makes no sense. The cinematography is done in a found footage, “The Blair Witch Project” kind of way but since the movie revolves around two kids and neither of them are holding the camera, the style doesn’t make any logical sense. There really is no plot and there is no character development or explanation for the evil in the movie. Writer/director/editor/asshole Kyle Edward Ball is so lazy that instead of coming up with any kind of backstory, development, lore, explanations, logic, etc., he just wants to create a mood that will have you fighting to stay awake. This is the most boring movie I have ever watched in my life and the hour and 40 minute running time might as well have been three hours with how long it felt. The first 20 minutes is just shots of household objects/parts. A minute of a white wall. Another minute of a bed. More time showing LEGOs on the floor. If you’ve ever looked at a Bed, Bath & Beyond catalogue and wondered how you would adapt it into a movie, then look no further than this abomination that single handedly has made me lose any and all respect I had for IFC Midnight and Shudder. They might as well be Saban Films now. If I can help stop even one poor soul from deciding to watch this cancer, I will die a happy man who will have made a difference in the world and changed planet Earth for the better. I thought maybe the first 20 minutes were just establishing the mood/tone and then we would kick things off. I have never been against slow burn films that take their time and then have exciting climaxes. Unfortunately for me (I was the only person in the theater and now it all makes sense), the entire movie was like that. Everything is filmed off center for no apparent reason. The static noise and grainy images feel like a bad ASMR video that literally did make me tired, which is easy to do when nothing is happening in your movie. This movie sets a personal record for me for the most times I’ve checked my phone just to see what time it was and how much longer I had to suffer for. If I wasn’t a film critic, I would have not walked but joyously frolicked out of the theater, cleaning myself of the icky feeling of how not to make movies. Every student film I watched when I attended film school was better than this. “2 Girls 1 Cup” had more of a plot than this monstrosity and “Glass Ass” had more character development. Since jump scares are the laziest and easiest way to “scare” an audience, the movie attempts a couple of jump scares with only two visual moments but mostly attempts jump scares only with audio. We hear the static and the popping noises of the camera and then get bombarded with high pitched screeches, as if loud noises were an excuse for genuine horror. The ending is incredibly anti-climactic and feels like it could have been any other scene in the movie. We even get overly long opening credits (why?!) that ends with a dedication to a dead person and while I don’t know if someone related to the movie actually died or if this is a fake death to set the mood, my only regret is that Ball himself didn’t die while making this so we all could have avoided the worst movie in the history of cinema. This movie is 90% shots of furniture, 8% dialogue and 2% loud noises/cheap jump scares. We get subtitles when the two toddlers are speaking because kids can be hard to understand at times but 1) why are they always whispering and 2) we often don’t get those same subtitles when we need them but then are given them when we don’t need them. How lazy is this movie? One of the subtitles says, “I dont know” without the apostrophe. Yet later in subtitles the same word and words like “couldn’t” do get the apostrophe, showing that even typos made it into the theatrical cut. With absolutely nothing scary for an alleged horror movie, no plot or character development, vanilla direction, nonsensical cinematography, insanely long shots of inanimate objects, an anticlimactic ending, lazy jump scares that don’t work, literal typos in the subtitles and the only memorable thing being how much I hate this movie and everyone who worked on it, “Skinamarink” makes me want to skin Ball’s balls so he can’t commit further acts of domestic terrorism on countries that make the mistake of allowing whatever crap that gets sent to the theater to play for a tiny, foolish audience.
#Skinamastink / #DirectedByKyleEdwardSucksBalls / #StaticSchlock / #RedditAndWeep / #PainAndGrain / #ToTheWindowToTheWall
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