Skillhouse is a crude and gory mess—and its weak script does nothing to assuage that issue. The movie hopes to satirize the lengths influencers go to gain views, but with its over-the-top death scenes and partial nudity, Skillhouse commits the same sins it is hoping to decry.
If 10 people woke up in a strange home after being kidnapped, chances are high they’d freak out.
But when 10 social media influencers undergo the same circumstances, well, their only concern is who has the most followers.
That attitude is kind of why they’re there. These influencers obsess over their clicks, their views, their followers. And, to someone, they’re responsible for the degradation of society itself.
The phones in their pockets vibrate. Rapper 50 Cent—the apparent pawn of their kidnapper—appears on screen, reading a list of rules.
Their social media accounts have each been set to zero followers, and over the course of 10 rounds, they’ll make content to gain back what they had. Whoever has the fewest number of followers by the end of a round dies. The last remaining influencer gets to leave.
Millions of people tune in via livestream to see what the influencers will do.
Most think it’s a joke.
That’s before the first victim gets decapitated.
Somewhere under all the poor acting and gore, there’s a semblance of a message about the sad lengths some influencers will go to just to get a few more followers. And there’s another message about how audiences egg those influencers on by glueing themselves to their screens no matter how dark things get.
The killer claims that he’s a messenger of God. He says God’s wrath is raining down upon the world for replacing Him with personal glorification on social media. And he believes killing them will “cleanse” the world, assuaging that wrath: “They will die so you can live,” he tells those tuning into the livestream. The killer says that a woman is impure in God’s eyes.
Someone says, “There’s no water in hell.” A news article describes the influencer situation as a “Seven Sins Crusade.” A woman believes in Darwinism.
One of the influencers, Josiah, is a Christian. He prays for God to save him from the situation. And, to the film’s credit, instead of using him to make a mockery of Christianity, he’s actually one of the only likeable characters in the whole script.
A woman wears a see-through shirt, and we see her breasts. Other female characters wear revealing clothing, such as low-cut tops and bikinis. A shirtless man flexes his pectorals. A commenter chides a female influencer for not getting naked for (admittedly life-saving) views just before her death.
Getting naked for views is exactly what one of the other female influencers does, removing her clothes to boost her follower count. We see the side of her breast and her rear when that happens. Later, she dances in her underwear, which becomes her common apparel. A commenter says he’d like to have sex with her. She asks Josiah to collaborate for more views by rubbing oil on her body. And she laments to the camera that people only want to watch her because of her body rather than because of her intellect.
One influencer is gay, and the others reference his Grindr account from time to time.
Skillhouse falls under what many call the “torture porn” or “splatter film” genre, wherein each death is meant to be over-the-top gruesome and gory.
To that end, we see a few decapitations—which are probably the mildest of the murders here. The killer forces a woman to burn herself with acid, which eats through her skin and bones, causing limbs to fall off. (Her bodily remains, reduced to a few bones and flesh, are found later.)
A couple of people’s heads are impaled by sharp weapons. In one scene, a woman dies via a sword falling down her throat, and the film repeatedly flashes back to this scene—as if we had forgotten what had happened just moments before. A man gets shot, and the other influencers later find his dismembered body in a box. Someone else’s lower jaw is blown off her face. A man has his throat slit. One woman is force-fed water from a hose, causing her stomach to swell unnaturally. She’s then stabbed to death in an explosion of water and blood.
As you might image, these deaths each come with fountains of blood. But the carnage doesn’t stop there:
A woman self-harms to get more followers, cutting the skin off her face and pulling it away to reveal the muscle tissue underneath. One guy, in the most graphic and crude way possible, threatens to rip out a woman’s rib and stab her 12-year-old sister in the head with it.
Some influencers fight with blades, and they both receive blood-gushing cuts. Another cuts his feet on broken glass. A man’s face gets burned with acid.
We hear the f-word nearly 100 times, including a handful of instances paired with “mother.” The s-word is used more than 15 times. We also hear uses of “a–,” “b–ch,” “crap,” “h—,” “ho” and “p-ss.” God’s name is used in vain roughly 10 times, and Jesus’ name is likewise used in vain three times.
A police officer accuses someone of using drugs. Someone drinks champagne. An influencer joyfully announces that the fridge is filled with alcohol.
A woman vomits. A man says he wet himself in fear.
I think it goes without saying that I could never make a movie as good as those directed by Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan or James Cameron. But in high school, I made a 10-minute movie for a project in Spanish class, and even that (in my own humble opinion) was far more compelling and interesting than Skillhouse.
Skillhouse is a dark satire film that smacks you over the head with its message about the problems with influencer culture harder than some of the hits its own characters endure: When a woman is chided for self-harming to get clicks, she screams out, “Every time we post we hurt ourselves!” Hint, hint.
Do we at Plugged In, the site made to help families learn and practice media discernment, agree with the principle of the issue set forth in Skillhouse? Sure.
But if you’re going to make a movie about how influencers will do anything for clicks—and how complicit audiences will refuse to turn off their screens no matter how messed up things get—it’s strange to then revel in making your movie as stomach-churningly gory as possible.
In doing so, you’re just practicing the same thing you’re criticizing. That doesn’t make you thought-provoking: It just makes you a hypocrite.
Speaking to The U.S. Sun on the film’s portrayal of that bigger issue, actor Bryce Hall (who is himself an influencer in real life) said, “People do some really messed up things for views.”
Yes. They sure do. Hint, hint.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He’s also an avid cook. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
