Good afternoon, House of Madness immortals:
If you in fact could become immortal, how would you spend your days and evenings exploiting your powers? Would you bungee jump without the aid of a cord, watching the earth below race at you 1000 miles per hour, and as your face introduces itself to the pavement, you simply pop up with a "TAH-DAH" for everyone to appreciate? Perhaps you're more interested in being the new crash test dummy for the automobile industry; sure, it'll get boring being driven into a wall at high speeds after a while, but you're doing good for the sake of all humanity. You could dress up like a superhero and fight crime with no fear of being shot or maimed, but let's be honest - if we were immortal, 94% of us would waste our talents on having grenade fights with our siblings while we surfed behind vehicles on the Autobahn during rush hour.
Jimmy 'Skinny' Skinford (Joshua Brennan) is pretty much a born loser; his intentions are good, and his heart is in the right place, but to say he's made some questionable decisions in his life would be like saying Rob Lowe or Gary Busey have a couple of regrets. Skinny has problems, but his most pressing one is the health of his ailing father Guy (Ric Herbert), and he needs to come up with some quick cash in order to help pay for his treatment. Enter lifelong friend and incompetent loser Skeazy (Edward McKenna), and the two bumbling idiots are off to the races in a get-rich-quick scheme delivering a truck full of unknown cargo to the local mafia. Things of course go sour, and the next thing Skinny knows he's got a bag over his head and is being transported to a deserted location where he is to dig his own grave. As Skinny is digging, he comes across a hand reaching out from the sand and loses his mind, forcing his captor to open fire on him, yet nothing happens. He's shot over and over until he finally pulls a woman named Zophia (Charlotte Best) through the dirt, gets a hold of the gun, and kills the man that brought him to this awful place. Impossible. As the two get in the vehicle to leave, a bomb goes off planted underneath the vehicle, and the two walk away from the wreckage unscathed. What the fuck is going on here? Skinny quickly handcuffs himself to his immortal princess, and sets out for some real answers.
If the entire film had been presented as well as the first 15 minutes, we'd have a real winner on our hands here, and of that I'm certain. Instead, the film veers off into a bizarre twist of mutated women, cult-ish little girls, and a weird sort of hunting for sport scenario that makes little sense. Top it all off with an outlandish 'twist' at the end that comes out of left field faster than Ted Williams, and the film that started out so strong barely fizzles its way past the finish line. Personally, I thought it would have been nice to get more backstory not only on Zophia, but also on Falkov (Goran D. Kleut) and especially Kovac (Coco Jack Gillies) to help explain why they were so hellbent on everything they were doing, and with a runtime of only 84 minutes, there was certainly room for a little more character development. Alas, we must deal with what's been given to us, and unfortunately in the case of "Skinford", we've been given a stick of dynamite with no fuse; they do hint at a sequel, so perhaps the next chapter will contain more of the backstory this film so desperately needed.
Madness Meter: 4/10
NB
