‘Skinned Deep’: One of the Most Bonkers Horror Films of the 2000s Is Now Streaming on Screambox

It was the week of Valentine’s Day in 2004. While young romantics everywhere were doing their best to be struck by Cupid’s arrow, Outkast released seminal classic Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Family Business was the small screen star while Todd Phillips released the pre-Hangover seventies reboot Starsky and Hutch. And against all odds, a strange little slasher-monster-science fiction movie found release. That gonzo movie was Skinned Deep.

Now if you watch Skinned Deep, you will spend the majority of the time (just like I did) wondering if you read it wrong that the movie was made in 2004. Yes, it is two decades behind us but Skinned Deep actually looks more akin to the shot on video films of the late eighties and early nineties. And director Gabriel Bartalos refused to let his microbudget hold him back.

Bartalos had existed in the horror scene for almost twenty years at the time, working make-up and special effects before he got a shot at his own flick. Bartalos got his start in Hollywood in 1986, working on Spookies, before going on to work with legendary horror directors on beloved cult films; Frank Henenlotter on Frankenhooker and Brain Damage, and Sam Raimi on Darkman, as well as providing make-up for nearly all of the Leprechaun films. Needless to say, heading into the 2000s, Bartalos had already shown he had a proclivity for the weird.

But none of his past work holds a candle to the surreal exotica that is Skinned Deep.

From the outside looking in, Skinned Deep is nothing all that original. It’s pretty much a major lift from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, following a family travelling through rural America that is captured and tortured by an odd clan of serial killers. It borrows a smidge from The Hills Have Eyes as well, giving us a version of a mutant family, while also leaning a bit into that Mad Max wasteland feel. The first thirty minutes of the movie, in particular, feel extra low budget and like a straight up ripoff of the Tobe Hooper classic.