Skinned Alive (1990) Horror psychos

Skinned Alive (1990) -  . Its a simple setup for a very simple film. Tempe DVD is still in business and still selling some wonderfully horrible trash films. This one is horrible but not wonderful and really difficult to get through. What do you expect for a film made for $18k? A family of psychopaths travel the country looking for victims to kill, skin and make leather products out of. Could be an interesting set up but the script written by director Jon Killough is a horror comedy lacking both horror and comedy.  The primary problem is the cast that just yells at each other in every scene and swears constantly. Playing completely over the top might have seemed like a good idea at the time this feature was made but it really has not aged well. We have a family of killers here, Crawldaddy (Mary Jackson) the Mom is the handicapped matriarch with two adult children, Phink (Scott Spiegel) and Violet (Susan Rothacker) who drive around killing people and then skinning them. The chaos of what they do is not in their actions but more in their interactions with each other. Shouting, cursing and general low brow behavior makes the film almost unwatchable. There is a bit of a storyline when they settle into a neighborhood after their van breaks down. They are invited by the locals Paul (Floyd Ewing Jr.) and Louise (Jennifer Mullen) to stay with them, contrasting the trusting locals with the traveling assholes. There is some killing and then stupidly not getting rid of the bodies, so the risk of getting caught but there is a problem with this set up. The locals are way too simple to get these people are jerk offs and family of killers are way too unlikable to care if they get caught. You sort of want them to get caught just to shut them up.
  The sort of one reasonable character is the neighbor Tom (Lester Clark) a former cop with a powerful gun. When the shit hits the fan he lets the human leather making family have it and its the one thing that we can cheer about in the film. All and all though this is not a fil I can remotely recommend. Its on you if you need to make yourself suffer through it.

Galaxy of the Dinosaurs (1992) Science Fiction

Galaxy of the Dinosaurs (1992) - This is an early film featuring James Black, the director of the also reviewed film The Vault. Here he is Captain Kronick, the leader of a group of astronauts from another planet who crash land on a planet full of dinosaurs. The group is up looking for some fast food on earth, McDonalds to be exact, when the navigator Graft (James L. Edwards) realizes they are no where near earth and in fact things are going bad on the ship. The crew already on the way to the surface in the shuttle can't do anything to help Graft with the ship, and it does not make it. Now the crew has to land on the strange planet without a ship to go back too.

Now explaining the plot here is pretty easy, but ultimately unfair. You readers may think this is a film you should check out but you would be wrong. The production values are incredibly poor in this mess. When the crew get to the surface most of the time I think they just used natural lighting. The plot is weak to comical, with most of the film the group reacting to public domain film clips from old claymation dinosaur sequences spliced into the story they are telling. Now the credit this film should get is that it was made for $2500 and actually has a plot that is more than just walking and running around the woods. The crew are wonderful cardboard, Kronick by James Black, Morda (Christine Morrison), Tom Hoover as Benj the repeated and annoying comic relief for the film, Prof Geting (Bill Morrison), Scott Emerman as Doctor Foreband, and Joseph A Daw as Bob the Caveman who appears only in manufactured clothes so caveman may not be the appropriate term for his character.

So back to not talking about the plot... Most of the film is dinosaur clips and reaction shots but at the end a long and complicated plot is laid out in a two and a half minute monologue by one of the characters, since nothing of any of this plot was ever included in the film it is utterly useless to us as an audience. Note also, a bit unrelated but we should never get to see a boom mic in the film as we did in this one. When all is said and done the writers Jon Killough and Todd Brown and the director J.R. Bookwalter should be ashamed. On the other hand this kind of low budget, make it on the fly movie is how many people break into the field. Certainly James Black has gone on to do some excellent work in TV. So if you are high and want to laugh your ass off or you are not and are into punishing yourself you can check out Galaxy of the Dinosaurs but you should probably just pass.

Rating (0.9) 5.0 and up are recommended