Skull and Bones (2007)
Review by Fatally Yours
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m no expert when it comes to gay porn. As a straight woman, I’m just not turned on by man-on-man action, no matter how hot the men might be. After watching Skull and Bones, a tale of HOMOcidal mania, consider my cherry popped. It’s much more like a porno than a slasher, especially since it focuses on a repetitive plot that revolves around the next brutal ass-raping and not much else.
Gay sex buddies Nathan (Derrick Wolf) and Justin (Michael Burke), united by their passion for slasher, vigilante, and zombie films and extreme criminal biography yet bored and frustrated with their lives as students at an obscure college in impoverished New Haven, CT, decide to teach a self-important straight classmate a lesson by raping him. The drug-fuelled incident goes awry and their classmate dies. Panicked, Nathan and Justin hide the body. Down the street sits elite Ivy University. When Ivy administrators hear of the disappearance of a local student they bury the story to avoid political mayhem on the crime-ridden campus. Meanwhile, Nathan and Justin decide to pay Ivy a visit to wreak more havoc.
They alight at an Ivy bar, hoping to identify a drunk, straight Ivy undergrad, lure him home, and photograph him having sex with them. Their goal is to extort money via blackmail. While they do encounter a promising group of four Ivies, the evening does not go their way. Drunk to oblivion, the Ivies brag about being future world leaders: they have been tapped to join the most selective of Ivy’s secret societies, Skull and Bones – just like George W. Bush – and put down Nathan and Justin for being losers from the other side of the tracks. With humiliation added to their rage, the resentful duo decides to kidnap the Ivy men one by one.
You know, the first few minutes I was actually digging this film. Nathan and Justin are going back and forth, talking about horror flicks like Dawn of the Dead, Last House on the Left and Nathan is explaining to Justin the finer points of famous serial killers. And then they decide that it would just be oh-so-fun to kidnap and rape an “annoying” straight student in their class…and the rest of the movie if pretty much the same kidnap and rape scene played over and over, with a few different locales and rituals thrown in to spice things up a bit.
Skull and Bones is a self-professed “darkly humorous satire,” and while there are a few funny bits scattered throughout (mostly due to their extremely campy and over-the-top nature), the social commentary on class and politics gets lost beneath the crushing weight of boredom that sets in as well as the repetitive rape scenes. Filmmaker T.S. Slaughter explains that the explicit rape scenes were included as “a means of first shocking the audience out of its complacency in order to make the point that rape and murder are actually heinous acts, despite the fact that we have become numb to them in our violent culture through repetition both in the headlines and on television; and second, of forcing the audience to come to grips with how twisted many of us truly are.” Problem is, the rape scenes are pretty much shot like porn, and do not portray the acts as heinous. Plus, there are so many repetitive rape scenes and they are given so much unnecessary screen time that the audience does become desensitized to them, something Slaughter was trying to avoid.
Furthermore, the plot offers nothing new or inventive, and just gets repetitive after a while. The killers try and spice things up a bit by donning masks of Bill Clinton, George Bush, Saddam Husseim, and Osama Bin Laden and even dip into a bit of Haitian voodoo (by far the best scene of the movie) as they try and make the Ivies their zombie sex slaves, but even with a 73 minute run time, this film seemed to drag on and on. The revenge angle was weak, the characters were poorly developed and even the campiness wore thin after a while. The last redeeming value this movie could have would be the performances, but even then it fails bitterly.
The acting is stilted, feels forced and is incredibly awkward. In keeping with the campiness, perhaps this was the desired effect the filmmaker had in mind. To the viewer, though, the acting appears laughable bad. The outstanding offender is Michael Burke playing Justin, though perhaps equal blame can be placed on T.S. Slaughter for giving him such horrible dialogue to work with. Justin follows Nathan around like a lost little puppy, never once questions what they are doing (Nathan is always the ringleader) and spews lines like, “Oooooh Nathan, you are soooooo awesome!”
As for the directing, again you might as well watch a porno. There’s bad lighting aplenty and one scene in particular is “recycled” four times, the exact same cut shown over and over each time Nathan and Justin are picking up a new Ivy boy. Was this done for camp value? Inside joke? Sheer laziness? As a comment on society? Budgetary constraints? The world may never know…but gosh darn if it wasn’t annoying and intrusive (though not as intrusive as the anal penetration shots, I’m sure)!
If you’d like a little man-on-man softcore rape-porn with a pinch of revenge and horrible acting thrown in for good measure, hey, then by all means check out Skull and Bones. However, if you are looking for something horrifying and with the brutality of Deliverance, I Spit on Your Grave or Irreversible or even if you are looking for a campy gay slasher like Hellbent, you will definitely be let down with Skull and Bones.
Available on Amazon
Skull and Bones – Official Site
Popularity: 1% [?]
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