SKIN COLLECTOR | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Julian Richards (18, 87 mins)
A grimy exploitation film that wears its B-movie horror credentials on its sleeve, Newport-born director Julian Richards’ horror film has taken a while to get to these shores after its release in the USA as Shiver back in 2012. A serial killer played by Australian John Jarratt, so memorably unpleasant in Wolf Creek, is on a murder spree, killing young women who reject his advances and giving himself the persona of The Gryphon. When one of his intended victims, played by scream queen Danielle Harris, evades an attack, he becomes obsessed with her, determined to claim her as his own, and going to extreme lengths to do so.
Very much playing to its intended horror-hound audience, Skin Collector is full of familiar tropes, lashings of violence and some over-the-top dialogue. It also manages to relocate Starship Troopers star Casper Van Dien as a cop with a slightly developed dark past, and even has Rae Dawn Chong from Commando cropping up as his partner. The deaths are bloody and nasty, garrottings aplenty with squirm-inducing unpleasantness – obviously a skill Richards has retained after the gruesome The Last Horror Movie, his third film and a zero-budget, nastily effective chiller requiring a strong constitution.
Harris eventually turns the tables on her seemingly unstoppable pursuer, after being kidnapped, tied up and assaulted. Made on an obviously low budget at speed, this slasher nods to a wealth of other psychopaths in the wake of Hannibal Lecter and the occasional hint at something deeper. Jarratt munches the scenery as a pathetic but determined killer and a resilient Harris holds her own against him. Although the backstory of the detectives feels rather perfunctory and unnecessary, the uncomfortable luridness in the killings has Richards ably playing to the horror-genre fanbase.
Released on DVD and VOD on Mon 15 Feb
words KEIRON SELF