Parents, as tempting as it is, do not conduct an autopsy on your spouse in front of your 6-year-old boy. He’ll only grow up to be the kind of man who kills prostitutes just so he can slice off their faces and wear them over his own like dime-store Halloween masks. This probably goes double if your last name is Skinner.
In the sleaze-oozing Skinner, Dennis Skinner (Ted Raimi, Intruder) embarks on that low-in-demand career path. (Thanks, Pa!) Drifting into town, Skinner rents a room from a lonely housewife (Ricki Lake, Hairspray).
Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, a smack-addled mystery woman (played by former porn star Traci Lords) checks into a nearby hotel. She’s dressed like Carmen Sandiego at a funeral and her coat hides the fact that her left arm and leg are as veiny and shriveled as an octogenarian who forgot how to get out of the bathtub. She’s “hunting” Skinner to get her revenge for past transgressions, but is obviously terrible at it since she’s already spent five years doing so.
Also terrible: this movie, directed by Ivan Nagy, a large-looming figure in the Heidi Fleiss scandal of the 1990s and a man whose work has gone from an all-American superhero (1979’s made-for-TV Captain America II: Death Too Soon) to all-access porn, so Skinner‘s entirety is tainted with a coat of feculence.
Surprisingly, its most distasteful bit doesn’t even involve a female body part. Rather, it’s a blackface routine — well, so to speak — as an African-American man who upsets Skinner finds himself short one visage. Skinner doesn’t merely put it on — he also adopts a stereotypical shuffle and ebonics dialect! It’s the most racist thing I’ve seen since any email forwarded by my dad to his entire address book during either Obama campaign. Viewers might be able to forgive one line (“Yeah, baby!”), maybe two, but the shtick extends from one scene into another, with Raimi pouring his life into it as if auditioning for a Sanford and Son reboot.
As Al Jolson famously said, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” —Rod Lott