Day 2 of Horrortoberfest and I’m still going through the recent horror movies that I missed. Skinamarink is one of those movies that I was sort of dreading watching. Not because I thought it was going to be scary but because of the exact opposite. The movie became this indie darling with so many people singing its praises but I had this sneaking suspicion that I just wasn’t going to vibe with it. Turns out, I was entirely correct and the movie is very much not for me.

Normally this would be the part of the review where I would briefly go over the plot of the movie that I watched. Unfortunately, this film doesn’t so much have a plot as it has a series of grainy establishing shots with static playing in the background broken up by the music of free use cartoons. The framing of this is ostensibly two little kids (like 4-6 years old) are in their house but the windows and doors are gone and maybe it’s a nightmare or maybe there’s a demon or maybe I don’t care because it’s an hour and half of what should have easily been a 5 minute short film.

To give you an idea of how this movie was for me, I continually felt like I was going to fall asleep and once it ended I had to go into the other room and rant to my housemates about what a crock of shit I just had to sit through. Maybe if you’re the type of person that gets creeped out by grainy shots of carpet while listening to someone rub a blanket on a microphone then this will be a fantastic watch for you. For me, I spent most of the runtime with the They Might Be Giants song Experimental Film running through my head so I would at least have something entertaining to occupy my thoughts.

It takes almost an hour into this movie before it does anything remotely scary but, unfortunately, that is immediately undercut by the fact that the movie doesn’t seem interested in it. The children don’t really react to things in a way that makes them seem afraid or in danger. We don’t even see anyone’s face so it is harder to gauge those reactions and makes connecting with them all that much harder. I know that it’s supposed to evoke the feeling you had as a kid when you had a nightmare about being in your home and you can’t find your parents and maybe there’s a monster. I get that. But have you ever had someone tell you about a dream they had and it was the most boring, banal shit you’ve ever heard? That’s what this is but in movie format. For 100 minutes.

I had toyed with the idea of making this one of the podcast episodes but decided against it and I’m glad because I honestly doubt Jef could have made it through this without just playing a video game while this ran in the background.

Score: 1 out of 5