Crew
Director – Ivan Nagy, Screenplay – Paul Hart-Wilden, Producers – Jeff Pollon & Brad Wyman, Photography – Greg Littlewood, Music – Contagion, Makeup Effects – KNB EFX Group (Supervisors – Howard Berger, Robert Kurtzman & Gregory Nicotero), Production Design – Jonathan Carlson. Production Company – Wyman-Pollon.
Cast
Ted Raimi (Dennis Skinner), Ricki Lake (Kerry Tate), David Warshofsky (Geoff Tate), Traci Lords (Heidi), Richard Schiff (Eddie), Time Winters (Bob), Blaire Baron (Gloria), Roberta Eaton (Sandy), Christina Engelhardt (Rachel), Dewayne Qilliams (Earl)
Plot
Dennis Skinner takes a room that Kerry Tate is advertising as available for rent. This causes jealousy with Kerry’s husband Geoff, a trucker who is always away on the road. Dennis gets a job at a local factory. Underneath his mild manner, Dennis is a serial killer who likes to skin victims and then wear their skin.
Ivan Nagy (1938-2015) was a Hungarian immigrant to the USA who maintained a minor directorial career. (His last name incidentally is pronounced ‘narge’ – rhyming with Marge). Nagy made three theatrical films in the early 1970s but these have been little seen. He soon gravitated into episodic tv work and tv movies such as Captain America II (1979), Once Upon a Spy (1980), Mind Over Murder (1981), Midnight Lace (1981), and others. Skinner appears to be Nagy’s most well-known work – immediately after this, he turned to making adult films. Nagy’s later claim to fame was as boyfriend of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss where he was allegedly involved in running a prostitution ring along with her, while he was also at one point received a conviction for bookmaking.
Almost certainly, Skinner was inspired by The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the character of Buffalo Bill who skins women to wear their bodies. (This was an aspect that was more prominent in Thomas Harris’s original novel than the film). Ivan Nagy takes the idea and runs with it. Although, unlike the Serial Killer Thriller type of storytelling that The Silence of the Lambs patented drawn from FBI behavioural profiling methods, Skinner drops all the forensic psychology, even having any kind of investigating detective/FBI agent, and is more in the vein of a 1970s Psycho Film where killers were plain just bug-eyed crazy and twisted without the need for delving into psychological motivations or explanations of what makes them tick – there is briefly a story Ted Raimi tells about his father but that is it in terms of insights into his character.
In his other works, Ivan Nagy was a fairly middle-of-the-road to unexceptional director – you could easily use the phrase ‘journeyman-like’ to describe his work. However, there are a couple of scenes that give Skinner a complete what-the-feck-did-I-just-watch element to them. One of these is where Ted Raimi has a girl imprisoned and then skins her, slicing open her back and pushing his hand inside, and then turning her over and peeling her face right off. This is the scene that pushed Skinner full-on into the realm of Censorship Controversy and was cut in some territories. The other completely whacked scene is where we encounter Raimi prancing around wearing a skin that we then realise has been taken from his African-American co-worker, all the while putting on an outrageously cliché ebonic accent like some slow-witted old timer from a 1930s Amos and Andy comedy.
Three decades on, Skinner is a fascinating watch for its managing to gather a bunch of names under one roof, all of whom went on to become more famous for other things. The most prominent of these is Ricki Lake who plays the wife. At the time, Lake was known for Hairspray (1987) and just on the cusp of becoming a daytime tv talkshow queen with Ricki Lake (1993-2004), which premiered in the interim between when Skinner was shot and released. Ted Raimi is the younger brother of director Sam Raimi and would gain his greatest attention with his role as Joxer in tv’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-9) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001). Richard Schiff, most well known for tv’s The West Wing (1999-2006) and a host of film roles, plays the landlord of a fleapit hotel. Traci Lords turns up as one of Raimi’s former victims. Back then, Lords already had her fame behind her when she was outed as an underage porn actress and at this point was trying to build a regular acting career.
Trailer here