Skinned Alive (1990)

... aka: Escolados vivos

Directed by:

J.R. Bookwalter (uncredited)

Jon Killough

In 1985, Bookwalter began filming his low budget zombie opus The Dead Next Door for his fledgling production company Tempe. Put into context of when it was made and released, the film was quite notable for a variety of reasons. For starters, it was shot entirely on Super 8, which was a film format until-then reserved almost exclusively for amateur home movies and vacation videos. While Dead wasn't the first to do that - Mark Pirro, for instance, had already shot several of his earlier films on Super 8 - it was a much more ambitious undertaking. Taking four years to complete and with an estimated budget of 125,000 dollars, it would later be called "the most expensive Super 8 movie ever made." Around midway through the production, the film also attracted the interest of both Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who were fresh off their success of the second Evil Dead. Raimi (who billed himself as "The Master Cylinder" in the credits) chipped in some money as executive producer while Campbell did some voice-overs and worked on audio. That ended up getting Dead some genre press coverage which then resulted in this small regional movie becoming a minor cult film on home video. That in turn led to a number of other independent horror productions over the next few decades from the same people.

Though (mostly) directed and written by Killough, who'd worked on all of Tempe's previous films, Bookwalter's stamp is all over this one. He produced, directed (both as second unit and in a finishing director capacity), did the music, did the titles and receives credits as camera operator, foley artist, sound effects and sound engineer. He also oversaw the re-edit and remastering of the film in 2002 for its initial DVD release. Most of the actors seen here had appeared in previous Tempe films, and many of them also worked various jobs behind the scenes on this one as well. This is the type of ultra low budget production where most of the folks involved had to wear multiple hats in order to get things done. Even so, this one almost never got done!

Skinned Alive is a Texas Chainsaw-inspired tale detailing the exploits / killing spree of a white trash family of serial killers as they travel around the Ohio countryside. The trio of psychos is led by Crawldaddy (Mary Jackson, and NOT the same actress from The Waltons as most websites currently state), the wheelchair-bound, eye-patch-sporting, beer-guzzling, constantly cackling and cursing matriarch of the clan, who suffers from some gender identity issues (she sometimes prefers to be called "daddy"), endlessly berates her idiot offspring and brags about killing her own mother. Her children are manic, pill-popping Phink (Scott Spiegel - INTRUDER) and man-hating blonde seductress Violet (Susan Rothacker), who share incestuous desires for one another and are every bit as obnoxious as their ma. The family get by operating a traveling tannery out of a black van and murder whoever they stumble across, skin them and make leather goods from their hides.

Having to be in Columbus the following day, their van picks the perfect time to break down in some "shithole redneck town." They offer friendly mechanic Tom Miles (Lester Clark) a thousand bucks if he can fix it ASAP, and he agrees to let these weirdos camp out in their basement for the night in the meantime, where they're constantly annoyed by his chatterbox wife, Whinnie (Barbara Katz-Norrod). In between, they indiscriminately kill whoever they happen to run across while shouting inane dialogue. That's about it as far as plot is concerned.

What this mostly amounts to is an excuse to show off gore fx, with awful, childish "comic" dialogue used to try to paste it all together. The first victim, a hitchhiker (played by the director), is kicked in the face, beaten with a hammer and then shot in the head. An obese guy (Michael Render) stumbles upon the killers after being stranded on the roadside when his "God damn piece of Jap shit" car breaks down. After offering them free tickets to "Wayne Newton's Las Vegas All Nude Revue," he's chased through a cornfield, impaled with a flying machete and shot multiple times. A delivery man (Mike Shea) has his fingers hacked off, a Jehovah's witness (played by Bookwalter) is immediately shot in the front yard in broad daylight then later skinned in the basement and another guy (James L. Edwards) listening to a Walkman and eating cheese puffs gets run over in front of a store. No one seems to really care.

Clearly having more space to fill than what the thin main story will allow, we're introduced to Tom and Whinnie's depressed next door neighbor, Paul Hickox (Floyd Ewing Jr.). Paul is an ex-cop first seen wearing a "Boycott Jane Fonda American Traitor Bitch" shirt, sucking down an entire fifth of vodka for breakfast and passing out. He lost his previous job for accidentally killing an innocent woman and is now going through a nasty, bitter divorce with his bitchy wife, Louise (Jennifer Mullen), who's already gotten custody of the kids and all of his money, and is in the middle of also getting the house. She and her divorce lawyer / lover (Michael Tolochko, also the cinematographer, executive producer, editor and camera operator) show up unannounced to rub salt in the wound by mocking him as he's packing up his stuff. While this should get us in Paul's corner, he's a sullen, self-centered drunk, a wife beater and as big of a shithead as anyone else in the movie, killers included.

Now a well-placed insult or use of profanity can certainly be funny if it's in the right context and done appropriately, but when half the dialogue of your film consists of juvenile attempts at crude humor, the effect becomes numbing and just plain irritating after awhile. Supposed zingers like "fat fuckwad" "dingleberry" "walking abortions" "dick cheese" "stupid fucking idiot jerk-off" and "fat crippled butt fuck" constantly being screamed at the top of lungs by terrible amateur actors playing detestable yet oddly flat characters just isn't much fun. Sad too because this could have been a pretty decent indy horror had the director / writer not coached the cast to act like this (bad actors / non-actors can be likable and personable if handled correctly) and the script not been so terrible.

Aside from some nice colors and autumnal Ohio scenery, the only other redeeming factor in this < 20,000-budgeted, 16mm production are the make-up effects by David Lange and Bill Morrison, with David P. Barton (who'd go on to work for KNB, Kevin Yagher and on many big budget Hollywood films) listed as a consultant. We get plenty of gore and blood here, including a head hacked in two, a body being completely obliterated by machine gun fire, a machete stuck in a shoulder, disembowelments, skinned corpses, a chest carving and much more. These bits are fun; the rest not so much.

Credited director Killough worked as a production designer and actor on a few other Tempe films (like Robot Ninja and the aforementioned Dead Next Door). According to Bookwalter, he also walked off the set at some point and never completed his own film, which forced him to step in and direct additional scenes to push the running time up to around 70 minutes, not including the slow credits. This appears to have severed Killough's ties with Tempe permanently since he didn't work for them again after this. The very busy David DeCoteau was the executive producer.

This was originally given an unrated VHS release on the Cinema Home Video label in 1990, which featured an unrelated photo of Linnea Quigley from MURDER WEAPON (1989) on the front cover. Ample footage from this also ended up padding out the same companies Shock Cinema documentary series.

Many DVD releases on numerous labels followed but those can all now be cast aside for the 2 disc "Ultimate Edition" Blu-ray release from Makeflix. It features the best possible restoration of the film (all things considered) and includes multiple audio commentaries (including a new one with the director and another with Bookwalter and Lange carted over from the 2002 DVD release), interviews with most of the cast and crew, a number of short making-of documentaries, behind the scenes footage, two episodes of a public access sitcom called Roommates many of these same folks worked on and a lot more. There was also a limited edition VHS release for collectors.

★1/2

Di san lei da dou (1980)

... aka: 第三類打鬥

... aka: 殺出地獄門

... aka: Fight Through the Gates of Hell

... aka: Heaven and Hell

... aka: Heaven and Hell Gate

... aka: Sha chu di yu men

... aka: Shaolin Hellgate

Directed by:

Cheh Chang

I'm so used to seeing amazing art direction from various Shaw Brothers productions that the opening scene here really threw me for a loop. This set, which is supposed to capture the splendor of heaven, looks incredibly cheap by their standards, with an obvious matte temple backdrop that looks like it could have been painted by some school kids. They do try to spruce it up with swirls of colorful fog, but it doesn't quite get the job done visually. What does work here is its amusingly atypical depiction of heaven that flies in the face of what a lot of folks are led to assume the "real" heaven would be like. A joyous place of eternal peace and contentment? Nah! This heaven is just as shitty as Earth; perhaps just as shitty as hell even!

I've always felt that if every sanctimonious, hypocritical, judgmental, pseudo pious, phony asshole who claims to believe made it through the pearly gates, and didn't receive a lobotomy or some kind of personality overhaul on their way there, that heaven wouldn't be all that it was cracked up to be. The makers of this film appear to agree with that notion. As depicted here, heaven is the usual assortment of haves and have nots, with the peasantry having to obediently serve the demanding, pampered jerks at the top of the hierarchy or else face the consequences. I'd imagine living through your earthly existence only to find the afterlife is essentially the same exact thing with the same exact problems and the same exact people you had to deal with as a mortal would be quite depressing. Make that doubly depressing; now you're also stripped of the possibility of death to finally put you out of your misery.

This also has a female ruler of heaven and the uptight and constantly scowling "Queen Mother" isn't such a nice lady. After participating in a silly choreographed dance, maid Zi Xiao (Maggie Li) finds out the hard way that you don't wanna upset the Queen. She's tasked with delivering a "magic peach" on a silver platter to her highness for her birthday, but accidentally trips, falls and drops it. Palace guards are then ordered to "punish" her by giving her 300 lashes and then locking her away in a cell for the rest of eternity. Peasant boy Zhou Bao (David Chiang), who's in love with Zi Xiao, steps in to save her and the two run off toward the South Gate, where they can escape heaven and return to Earth. Since heaven doesn't allow for marriage, getting out will also enable them to finally be together. For helping the two escape, royal guard Xin Ling (Yi-Min Li) is likewise stripped of all his supernatural powers and exiled from the kingdom.

Down on Earth, things get even stranger if you can imagine something even stranger than God demanding you be tortured and jailed for dropping a giant piece of fruit. For starters, we learn that the curiously subpar art direction of the heaven sequence is an intentional stylistic choice from the director, who is trying to make his film resemble a stage play, but only in the first 20 minutes. I'm sure there was some kind of artistic reasoning for this but whatever it was is completely lost on me. The same goes for the inclusion of several awkward musical numbers, which are also just in the first 20 minutes before the film completely forgets it was ever trying to be a musical. As for the characters, we meet entirely different sets of them at random intervals and continue to meet different sets until we get sick of meeting new characters and everything and everyone just becomes one big blur.

The first little subplot details artist Chen Ding ([Alexander] Fu Sheng) trying to save his bank secretary girlfriend Shi Qi (Fu's real-life wife Jenny [Tseng]) from brutal gangster Huo (Tao Chiang). While she's at work, some thugs show up to rob the place and kidnap her. She's then taken back to the gangster's home, raped and held hostage until her boyfriend can finally break her out. After Chen Ding defeats the thugs, the gangster enlists the aid of an experienced assassin (Lung-Wei Wang) to do him in and recapture Shi Qi. This leads to another brawl, but this one also involves Xin Ling, who's back on Earth working as a taxi driver. He manages to defeat the assassin but is also shot and killed in the process. Next stop: Hell!

Ditching the more minimalist approach of what has come before, hell here is actually a comic book-like visual treat in the expected Shaw Brothers way and filled with lots of gaudy colors, mutant guards, crazy tortures and maxed out set designs. While in heaven you're destined to be part of the slave class and have your eternity ruined for the most minor of infractions, hell's moral code is much more along the lines of letting the punishment fit the crime, only fairness and justice are absent because the residing judge (Miao Ching) is a bad combination inept and corrupt.

Interestingly, this hell has separate, specific departments, like one just for gamblers, who are forced into mahjong, domino and card games with cheaters and thus always lose; denying them of the gratification that once used to fuel their addiction. They then get their fingers chopped off, which miraculously reappear soon after and get to repeat the process over and over again. Greedy folks have to drink molten gold. Drunks are forced to ingest rivers of liquor. Gossips get their tongues ripped out. People hang from chains over beds of spikes, are frozen into ice cubes, bisected with giant saws, skinned alive, run over with plows, pulverized with grindstones, you name it! While heaven certainly isn't a treat, hell isn't such a fun place either. The impression given here is that perhaps it would be preferable for there to actually be no afterlife at all. Human contagion would probably manage to somehow screw it up.

Xin Ling befriends the beautiful Hung Chin (Chen-Chi Lin, who's completely wasted here in a decorative role but was used much more effectively by Tsui Hark in Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind this same year), who died after taking hallucinogens at a party and falling out of a window. After fighting back and causing some problems for the hell staff, Xin Ling is given a second chance at life after "The Buddha of Mercy" (Yung Henry Yu) shows up to answer his prayers. The merciful God allows him to assemble a posse of strong fighters to do battle with the hellish higher-ups. And, as if we needed even MORE characters, all four of these guys are given brief flashbacks to how they ended up in hell in the first place.

While engaged in a friendly battle, swordsman Tien-Yang Cheng ("Chui Kuo" / Phillip Kwok) was betrayed and then decapitated by his rival, Jia-Xiang Chang (Feng Lu). After avenging his father's murder, Tin-zan Yan ("Yen-Tsan Tang" / Bruce Tong) was captured and murdered while in prison by having a large metal rod pushed down his throat. Teenage ruffian Han-Ting Wei ("Mang" / Meng Lo) was shot in the back after a dispute with a corrupt cop who almost ran him and his friends over. Finally, Wei-Kang Lin (Chien Sun) was killed while trying to defend his girlfriend from some thieves / rapists. As you can probably tell, all of these guys unjustly ended up in hell just like Xin Ling, which also seems to explain why they still have red blood instead of black and are also given an opportunity to redeem themselves. But first they have to fight their way out of hell, which includes doing battle with all kinds fiends, including long-tongued wizards (one on stilts) and various H.G. Wells-looking animal-human hybrids (some of whom were the earthly enemies of the fighters) armed with spiked clubs and tridents.

With all of the unusual sights (including a truly trippy finale) and cheap make-up designs and weird costumes and great lighting schemes and crazy production design and non-stop, expertly choreographed action scenes, it's basically impossible not to be at least a little entertained here. And thank Buddha for that because the script couldn't be a bigger mess if it tried. Supposedly the film was made in fits and starts over the course of several years, which may explain why everything feels so disjointed and why the heaven and earthly lover characters are set up as leads but then never heard from again after the first 20 minutes. Though their stories are unresolved and unsatisfying (also rather pointless), this improves somewhat after it permanently relocates to hell for the final hour.

What this really feels like is a story-chucked-out-the-window excuse to not only squeeze in as many fight scenes as possible but also cram as many marquee stars from the Shaw Brothers stable into just one film as possible, coherence be damned!

Sheng Chiang (THRILLING BLOODY SWORD), Gary Siu (POSSESSED) and Dick Wei (THE SEVENTH CURSE) co-star as guardian angels that are decked out like drag queens complete with glitter, overdone eye make-up and feathery vests and skirts (!) Also here briefly are familiar veteran actors Ching-Ho Wong, Teresa Ha Ping, Chih-Ching Yang, Hsi Chang, Ching Tin and loads of others with hundreds of credits that I could mention. The director went on to make ATTACK OF THE JOYFUL GODDESS (1983) and THE NINE DEMONS (1984), which are both also strange and feature many of the same actors (a number of whom were Five Deadly Venoms vets) seen here.

There were several English-friendly DVD releases, including one through Image in 2007, who only offered the Mandarian language audio track with English subtitles. A characteristically awful English dubbed version is also available, though not recommended.

★★1/2