Skew starts on fine day as Richard Harrison (Richard Olak) & his girlfriend Eva Hansen (Amber Lewis) arrive at their friend Simon Lacey's (Rob Scattergood) place to pick him & his girlfriend Laura (Teneal Cutting) up to go on a long road trip, unfortunately Laura has changed her mind & doesn't want to go so it's just Richard, Eva & Simon. Having just brought a new camera Simon has decided to film the entire trip for prosperity, the three friends set-off & all goes well at first but Simon becomes obsessed with filming everything which starts to annoy both Richard & Eva. While filming checking in to a motel Simon notices that the face of the clerk is skewed & twisted, later that night the clerk is found dead, the strange occurrence continues to happen as whenever a person or animal's face is blurred or distorted while Simon is filming it ends up dead sooner rather than later including local tourist attractions, bus loads of people & even cop's. Simon is understandably shocked but is the camera responsible somehow & can he convince anyone to believe him...
Edited, written, produced & directed by Sevé Schelenz I have just finished watching Skew after it took me three nights to watch it in little pieces as I couldn't stand seeing more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, looking at the other reviews floating around the internet I am amazed that Skew is getting such a positive reaction as I thought it was one of the worst films I have seen in ages in every aspect. Let me try to explain why, when I watch a film I just want to be entertained & have some fun with it & if it educates me or makes me think a bit then that's fine but if a film bores me half to death & annoys the hell out of me such as Skew then I have no problem is saying so. For a start Skew lasts for just over 80 minutes & is as boring a film as I have seen in ages, almost literally nothing of any note happens, there's the odd random moment in which people's faces are distorted on camera & they end up dead somehow but is that really enough to warrant all the praise that is being heaped on Skew? Well, if the script did anything interesting or meaningful or coherent with the idea then yes, maybe but it doesn't & Skew ends up as some huge confusing & frustrating mess of a film that I absolutely loathed. Nothing in Skew makes any sense, surely any big budgeted Hollywood film would get ripped to pieces for being this random & incomprehensible? There are baffling moments throughout Skew that make no sense or seem to have any sort of logic that all build up to the most pointless, meaningless & unfathomable ending you could imagine. If anyone can make any sort of sense out of the ending that has any sort of logic within the context of the film then I salute them because it's just a confused mess as far as I am concerned. I won't go into it but the ending isn't so much of a twist as a random collection of scenes that seem to equally contradict the rest of the film & have seemingly no point in regard to the rest of the film. Look, I have no idea why anyone would like Skew & if these people who are giving it good reviews are genuine then fine but for me who just wants to be entertained by a film then Skew is my worst nightmare, it's a boring mess of a film that makes no logical or narrative sense & doesn't even have any sort of story or character's or dialogue to maintain my interest, I absolutely hated Skew & it represents just about everything I loath in a film.
Besides being conceptually awful I hated the way Skew was filmed in a point of view style as filmed by an amateur camcorder operator, it just looks ugly & has zero style or visual appeal to me. There are long stretches of pure black, as much shakiness as you can handle, plenty of shots which last for too long (a shot of a telephone that last for about a minute before anything happens), shots filmed from weird angles where you can't see what's going on properly & just a really bad camcorder look like it was filmed by a five year old. This shaky hand-held camcorder style of filmmaking is one that I hate, this comes down to personal preference but I hate the cheap camcorder look. I like films to look like films, to be colourful & visually appealing rather than drab & amateurish. A lot of the reviews state that there are lots of scary moments in Skew, well if there are I didn't notice them since most of the creepy moments seem to be quick flashes of what may or may not be ghosts or people with their faces distorted like someone has taken a rubber to a pencil sketch & tried to rub it out leaving a great smeary mess.
It's difficult to comment on the production values since Skew is meant to look this bad & amateurish but it's obviously a very low budget film & it show's. The acting is alright, we never see Simon the camera guy's face but I have to say all three main character's really got on my nerves & at the end I was glad to see the back of them.
Skew is a film that I absolutely hated, it made zero sense to me & was just an incomprehensible mess that did nothing for me conceptually or visually as the whole camcorder footage style is one that I loath. I hated Skew, it's as simple & straight forward as that really.
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