Close your eyes and imagine, if you will, an exhibition based around horror and fear. You might have some life-sized replicas of the archetypal monsters of the horror genre. There could be displays featuring the most common phobias, from spiders to heights, and a number of clowns randomly dotted around. And you could explore areas that depicted fears rooted in different stages of life. Older people worry more about mortality, as well as holding on to their mental faculties. Children have a lot more on their plate, from abandonment issues to imaginary boogeymen. The section depicting childhood fears could be quite a freaky blend of imagery turning even the most mundane objects into strange and menacing night-time terrors. And on one wall, perhaps at the very end of a long, dark, corridor, you could have Skinamarink projected on to a screen. Because that is what Skinamarink is. It’s a work of art to be incorporated into an exhibition. It’s certainly not a satisfying, or effective, horror movie experience.
Written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball, his feature debut after a couple of shorts that fans of this will be happy to check out, what you have here, apparently, is a tale of young children being watched, and sometimes spoken to. by a menacing presence.
That might sound good, and there is definitely potential in presenting a horror movie very much from the POV of young children, but the execution is awful. And I really mean that.
The camera is pointed at various parts of a house. You see part of a ceiling. You see a hallway with a dark doorway at the end of it. You see toys, including some LEGO bricks strewn around. You also see very brief images that are unnatural and scary. If you cannot quite figure out when you are supposed to be scared by what is onscreen, don’t worry, the ambient noise suddenly being punctuated by an audio sting fifty decibels louder than anything else in the scene should ensure that you are tricked into an involuntary jump.
There’s no point in mentioning the acting, and I resent wasting any of my time trying to think of any visual highlights (because this is an aggressively ugly and murky film from start to finish), but some of the audio work is decent. That is why I am willing to double my initial rating for this, which allows me to give it one point for some of the audio work and one point for the idea at the very heart of it. It still feels like one of the worst films I have had to slog through in recent months though, and I will be very surprised if I see anything else this year that makes me so frustrated and angry.
2/10
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