There are bad slasher movies, there are cheap splatter flicks, and then there’s Skinner (1993)—a film so committed to being unpleasant that you half expect the VHS tape itself to smell like formaldehyde and regret. Directed by Ivan Nagy, a man who admitted he didn’t even like horror movies (and it shows), Skinner is the kind of “independent” horror that feels like it was shot in a condemned warehouse using spare change and favors owed to Ricki Lake.
But hey, it does have Traci Lords, which means there’s at least one element worth keeping your eyes open for, assuming you haven’t already clawed them out by the halfway mark.
Ted Raimi: From Sam’s Brother to Buffalo Raimi
Let’s start with our leading man: Ted Raimi. Yes, that Ted Raimi, forever the “other Raimi” who appears in his brother Sam’s projects to scream, bleed, or play “Guy Who Gets Killed Third.” Here, he gets to be the star—unfortunately, the star of a movie that looks like it was financed with pawned VCRs.
Raimi plays Dennis Skinner, a seemingly nice young man with a dark secret: he’s a serial killer who skins sex workers because his father was a mortician and made him watch embalming. It’s basically Psycho by way of Texas Chainsaw Massacre if both had been rewritten by a guy whose only psychology class was taught at a bus stop.
Ted, bless him, does his best, but his “I am charming but secretly insane” performance mostly lands in the uncanny valley between “dorky substitute teacher” and “man trying to sell you knives in a parking lot.” When he wears his victims’ skin, you’re less horrified and more annoyed—like, great, now he’s monologuing about his dad again while peeling off a face.
Traci Lords: Junkie Avenger Extraordinaire
Enter Traci Lords, who shows up as Heidi, a prostitute with a heroin problem and a vendetta. Having survived Skinner once, she spends the film chasing him down like Nancy Drew if Nancy chain-smoked Virginia Slims and swore vengeance between nodding off.
Lords, to her credit, commits hard. She growls, she twitches, she stumbles, she screams. She’s essentially the only one bringing real energy to the film—though her character makes about as much sense as a crossword puzzle written in blood. Why does Heidi spend so much time lurking in alleys and not going to the police? Because the script needed her to look cool and tragic in leather pants, that’s why.
Still, compared to the rest of this fever dream, Lords feels like an Oscar-caliber performance. If anything, you end up rooting for her to ditch the plot entirely and start her own spinoff film: Heidi the Junkie Avenger: A Very Special Lifetime Original.
Ricki Lake: The Landlady of Bad Choices
And then there’s Ricki Lake, who plays Kerry Tate, Skinner’s landlady and eventual bedmate. Yes, Ricki Lake, daytime talk show host, is in this gore-drenched indie slasher, and yes, she gets seduced by Ted Raimi in a cardigan.
Her husband is a trucker who’s rarely home, which conveniently allows her to start a friendship (and later an affair) with Dennis. When he reveals his true self—literally showing her his face collection—her reaction is less “bloodcurdling scream” and more “bad soap opera gasp.” You almost expect her to turn to camera and ask the studio audience for advice.
The Gore, the Glory, and the Gall
This is a splatter movie, which means the gore is the selling point. Unfortunately, most of it looks like it was purchased at a Halloween outlet store during clearance season. The “skinning” effects range from “slightly gross” to “is that a latex mask from Party City?” The film lingers on them far too long, like a proud kid showing off macaroni art that nobody wants to see.
But the real horror isn’t the blood—it’s the pacing. Scenes stretch on like a corpse on a rack, every line of dialogue delivered as though the actors were paid per pause. The editing is so slack that entire sequences feel like they’re waiting for a director who’s already gone home.
Daddy Issues: The Movie
The script desperately wants us to believe Skinner is more than just a lunatic with a knife. He’s a tragic lunatic with a knife. Cue endless flashbacks and monologues about his abusive mortician father and the time he watched mommy get her face removed. It’s supposed to be Freudian horror. Instead, it’s like sitting through a therapy session conducted by Dr. Frankenstein after too many cocktails.
At one point, Skinner literally dons his mother’s face. This should be disturbing, but instead it plays like a bad drag act at a mortuary convention.
Climax in a Warehouse (Where Else?)
Like every low-budget horror of the era, Skinner ends in a warehouse. By this point, Kerry has been abducted, Heidi has tracked Skinner down, and Ricki Lake’s trucker husband has stumbled back into town, wondering why he left his wife alone with a guy named Skinner.
The final showdown between Traci Lords and Ted Raimi is supposed to be intense, but it’s really just a lot of yelling, stabbing, and industrial lighting. Heidi dies, Skinner gets caught, and before the credits roll, he reminds us that serial killers always get out eventually. Which, ironically, was also the motto of VHS distributors in the ’90s.
The Real Skinner: A Patchwork of Awfulness
So what do we have here?
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A lead performance by Ted Raimi, proving some family members really should stay behind the camera.
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Traci Lords trying her damnedest, injecting the film with enough charisma to keep it from flatlining.
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Ricki Lake having an affair with Ted Raimi, a sentence so cursed it could summon demons if said aloud three times.
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Gore effects that look cheaper than cafeteria spaghetti, paired with psychological “depth” that wouldn’t pass a first-year psych class.
The result is a movie that feels stitched together, much like Skinner’s victims: a patchwork of bad ideas, limp execution, and missed opportunities.
Final Thoughts: Bad to the Bone (and Skin)
Skinner isn’t scary. It isn’t clever. It isn’t even campy enough to be fun. It’s the cinematic equivalent of finding a dead rat in your garage: unpleasant, smelly, and not worth analyzing too closely.
And yet, it does have Traci Lords, who—despite playing a junkie prostitute—manages to inject life into a movie that’s otherwise DOA. She’s the only reason this isn’t completely unwatchable. If anything, Skinner proves that even in a movie about wearing people’s faces, Traci Lords was the only one who could keep a straight one.
