SKIN COLLECTOR

MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS, IF IT MATTERS

This fifth-rate slasher has actually been sitting on a shelf somewhere for a full ten years waiting for someone to bother releasing it in the UK. Frankly, even at the height of an ongoing global pandemic we're not so desperate for genre entertainment that we'll settle for films as depressingly poor as this. Meaninglessly retitled (nobody's skin is collected) from the generic and equally inappropriate Shiver, Skin Collector has a surprisingly good cast of familiar names but wastes them all in a bog-standard psycho non-thriller that almost seems to be harking back to the likes of The Toolbox Murders: the first half consisting of nasty kill scenes, the second consisting of the maniac ranting and whining to his captive.

John Jarratt (from Wolf Creek) is a pathetic loser who can't pick up girls, so he murders them with a garrotte and decapitates the bodies, keeping the heads in jars in a shack. Danielle Harris (from Halloween 4 amongst others) is the shy secretary who becomes his latest obsession when she fights back. Valerie Harper (from The Mary Tyler Moore Show!!!) is her unreasoning mother. Caspar Van Dien (from Starship Troopers!) and Rae Dawn Chong (from Commando) are the cops on the case, which is all very well until her given name is revealed to be Mavis; can they track the mad killer down in time to save his latest prey?

How ever much we might like some of the people involved, this is the kind of gutter-level dross that wasn't a good idea ten years ago and still isn't: it includes not only an entirely unnecessary scene of attempted rape but a workplace shotgun massacre littered with bad CG blood spurts. It's crass, it's ugly, it's absolutely nobody's idea of a good time, and it's not even particularly well done or, as a last resort, just visually interesting. Well worth the time and effort to avoid it.

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