Skinamarink

Shot entirely by the guy at the very end of the Blair Witch Project.

Your daddy left you because you didn't clean up your goddamn Legos like he told you to

I was 90% bored, 10% annoyed that anyone alive in the year of our lord 2022 still thinks it's acceptable to include jump scares in a movie. Not since Paranormal Activity has a movie given me such a strong feeling of "You mean that's IT?" I did as people advise and watched it in the dark late at night by myself, and all that really did was make me even sleepier.

As a child there was really nothing scarier than the place you spent your entire life being perverted by darkness. Would I ever watch this again or with anyone, nope but I love that for a moment it captured the nostalgia of being afraid

As a 10-minute style exercise, I would appreciate this for what it is, but there is nowhere near enough here for a 100-minute feature, and the "scare" moments are all cheap and ineffective and had me rolling my eyes

The swirling video grain, the tinny audio, and the bizarre cinematography that I truly don't know how to describe are all mined for maximum impact and uneasiness. I really liked this for the first two-thirds as an effective little experiment, but I'll admit that I was more intrigued than outright scared. Then the last third kicks things up a notch and I went from liking this a lot to outright loving it and found it genuinely terrifying.

I really wanted to like this more because it has such a unique and effective tone and aesthetic but I struggled heavily with it most of the time. Feels like a whole movie of cutaway shots which makes it hard to care for the kids when they just exist as, like, whispers and limbs. The vibe is definitely vaguely unsettling but not enough for the scares to feel any more than tepid to me. A very cool experiment that I’m glad exists, but not one that works as a feature for me.

While Ball does deliver the occasional jolt of terror Skinamarink is an extended tease on the audience’s imagination, which is the best experience a $15,000 budget can buy. Ball rigorously explores a space that hums with unseen menace and uncanny occurrences, drawing dim light from scant sources, like a TV that goes ghostly white when it’s not playing vintage cartoons from the public domain. He keeps you pinned to a child’s nightmare and chooses when to release you from it.

It's great that films can take risks and I certainly don't expect everything to work for me. This is clearly made for a niche audience that I am just not part of.

It's great that something so challenging and unconventional has garnered even a small measure of exposure. The jump scares are slightly cheap but so infrequent that the predominant feeling is the unsettling darkness in the door frames and corners of the ceiling.

This movie is why I never trust anything that brands itself or is branded by others as "experimental." Fuck this was so boring and unrewarding.

So this is essentially a student film where nothing happens. A cavalcade of low angle shots of various rooms with no characterization, no context, no background, like a drearily dull slideshow made by that annoying art kid from American Beauty. Maybe you could give it credit for being experimental, but this shit has been done back in the French New Wave. This is just a mumblecore remix of all the other insufferable film avant-gardistas who hate well-written narratives.

This doesn't need to be this long, but I've never seen anything like it. It's polarizing, but no other film captures what it actually FEELS like being in a childhood nightmare quite like this. It's daring narratively and stylistically, for better or for worse; at times I actually felt like I was in a nightmare. The camera and lighting (or lack thereof) makes us see things in the shadows that don't exist. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone, but I really liked what they did.

Absolute blast to watch at night with the lights off and the sound up. Childhood nightmare put to film.

Absolutely horrible! Totally unwatchable crap!

I am not the audience for this. It did nothing for me.

This is for the Blair Witch audience, who don't need massive jump scares all the time and prefer the anxiety of the slow build. The graininess/haziness of both the visuals and the audio is endearing. The house is the real central character. Ball goes against the grain a little by emphasizing things that are not that cinematic (such as staring at walls). It's more often than not tense but also sometimes boring, would have been a 90 if it were quite a bit shorter.

This is a kind of avant garde film where you get out what you put into it- it has slow pacing and odd camera angles and for a lot of it limits what it shows. But because that fed into my take of what was really going on, I stuck with it. This is a very love it-hate it movie I think. I'd not call it horror, though. SPOILER-INTERPRETATION- I think it helps to realize that the main character fell down the stairs and likely has some severe brain damage that impacts what he sees, hears, processes.

loved his short film "Heck" this was based on, but this left out a lot of cool stuff that Heck had and was a huge letdown

I didn't get this one. I'll give it credit for costing only $15K to make and grossing over $2 Million so far, but hardly anything happens, you are mostly staring at walls, floors and ceilings. It's called an experimental film and that makes sense.

Waste of time.

Could have been a great 30 minute movie.

It certainly has interesting elements but the 100 min runtime is just too much and the loud noise jump scares cheapened the concept a bit. It would've worked much better as a 20-30 min short. At times it feels like someone fed a few horror keywords to an AI and this came out.

Voices coming from the dark, stuff glued to walls and ceilings, and two kids trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with their house while their parents are not there. I wished I liked more than I did, but the first impression is of a pretty unique creepy, weird -- and maybe a bit stretched -- experience from start to finish.

This is not everyone's type of film, but this is very much my type of film. An upsetting and tragic horror film that exploits the familiarity of childhood to present something truly terrifying. It's not an easy sit, regardless of whether you understand what's going on, but it's worth checking out if you're curious.

When a movie starts with "all footage/sound is public domain obtained from archive.org", you know you're gonna have a bad time. It's just boring still shots of hallways with low grain filters and the occasional jump scare. It felt like a shitty indie horror game instead of a movie. Huge waste of time. I'm giving this a 6 solely because the toilet scene was the most hilarious thing I've seen this year. The rest of the movie is about as entertaining as watching paint dry.

so many great things about this movie - heavily nostalgic if you’re a kid who grew up in the 90’s. but unfortunately it’s a snooze

What would you do if the people you knew were the plastic that melted, and the chromium, too?

2022'de #IzlediğimFilmler ; 329. Skinamarink (2022) İzleyenleri ikiye bölmüş deneysel bir korku filmi. Deneysel işleri çok sevmeme ragmen, benim çocukluğuma ilişkin bir iz taşımadığı için içine hiç ama hiç giremedim. Bu nedenle beni hiç etkilemedi. 2/10

This is the kind of movie where I wish I liked it more than I did. I read a vague statement that it was an allegory for child abuse, and thinking about what I saw, that is actually a good way to look at it. Sadly, I’m in the camp that this might have been much better as a short film. You want to be scared, just look up some compilation of the best parts of this movie.

This goes all in on atmosphere, and almost qualifies as a single montage. Half of what happens is unintelligible without the captions. It's probably vastly preferable to watch this on a big screen, which I didn't, but I could tell that it's a bold movie and potentially very effective, contingent on the viewer's capacity to immerse themself in an experience almost devoid of onscreen life.

One of these movies that should have stayed as a 10 minute short film. How has this movie acquired a cult status already, seems unearned and undeserving.

Stylistic but too limited in how it's viewer can become immersed with the story. The irregular frames and exaggerated silence are always worth the adrenaline spike but just not enough to be good imo.

(film starts) (nothing happens) (I stop watching)

I really admire this; Ball trusts his audience, delivering a low-budget nightmare that feels truly original. But for every few moments where the movie thoroughly unnerves me, there's one where I wonder if there's a reason people don't usually make movies this way. The thing about demanding 100% of your viewers' attention is that you have to pay it off, and it didn't quite get there for me. It may do on rewatch. But even then, I'll probably still think it could have done with being 80 minutes.

I've heard a lot of people say you had to have a certain type of childhood fear for this one to really get to you, and I think that's pretty accurate. It does a good job of reminding you of those fears and making you afraid for the kids. That being said, I definitely agree with a lot of people that it drags for too long in a lot of places. I can't really see myself coming back to this one, but if you want a reason to be thankful you just have grown up fears now, I'd say go for it.

Might have been an intriguing short film.

Terrible pacing; the feature length is completely forced. Other than that it's very unique, but too vague. It's a full length movie with nothing going for it but atmosphere.

Every child's nightmare.