SLINK (2013)

Studio:       Gravitas Ventures
Director:    Jared Masters
Writer:       Jared Masters, Amanda McAuley, Marc Dishman, Randy Masters
Producer:  Mikko Tervonen, Anthony Del Negro, Amanda McAulay
Stars:     Julia Faye West, Danika Galindo, Art Roberts, Dawna Lee Heising, Anthony Del Negro, David Saucedo, Marilyn Brooks

Review Score: 

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Summary:

Two sisters uncover the connection between a creepy tanning salon owner and a line of designer handbags made from human skin. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Tanning salon owner Dale trains a girl that he hopes to hire. In the office, his wife Joan works on her handbag designs. Dale wants to hire the new girl, but Joan refuses. Joan takes a hammer and kills the girl while she cleans a tanning bed.

Kayla Nunez goes to the funeral home in Wickenhaven to pick up the ashes of her dead uncle Arlo. Xavier Nunez has sent his daughters Kayla and Courtney to Wickenhaven to sort through Arlo’s belongings following his death. Looking for a souvenir gift for her younger sister Hailey, Kayla learns of a local designer purse shop called Virgin Leathers. Joan is the store’s owner. Kayla purchases a handbag with a rose design and receives a free pass to the nearby tanning salon.

Kayla and Courtney arrive at Arlo’s house and discover that they are not alone. A woman introduces herself as their Aunt May, who is a relative that they did not know they had. Aunt May tells the girls to take whatever they would like from the house, as everything that she wants is contained in a shoebox.

Kayla cannot find the purse that she bought for Hailey. May tells the girls that Arlo did not die in bed, but that he went missing and May suspects murder. Kayla finds tanning salon goggles in the bathroom. A little girl is shown cleaning blood from a tanning bed.

Kayla searches the house for headache medicine. May tells Kayla to take some from her purse, which Kayla discovers is the one that she bought for Hailey. May overhears Kayla asking Courtney if she should confront May about the stolen purse. May tells Kayla that she only took the purse because she assumed it belonged to Arlo and was up for grabs.

With a garbage bag, Dale strangles a nude girl using a tanning bed. Kayla enters the salon. Dale enters her name in the computer and tells her that Arlo Nunez had an ultimate package. He puts her under Arlo’s account. While Kayla tans, Dale secretly records her on videotape.

Courtney talks to her father on the phone and learns that she does not have an Aunt May. Xavier decides to drive to Wickenhaven with Hailey and sort out the confusion. Courtney tells Kayla about May when she returns home from an afternoon of shopping with the woman.

Xavier comes to the house and confronts May. She convinces him that they really are related when he sees the shoebox of Arlo’s matchbook collection. May calls Dale and tells him what is going on at the house. They plot to kill and skin Courtney. May later suffocates Courtney with a pillow and transports her to a barn where a boy tends to the salon’s dead bodies.

In the morning, Xavier discovers that May and her bags are gone from the house. Kayla returns to the tanning salon for another session. While Dale and Joan monitor her from the office, Kayla eats a drugged candy. Back at the house, Xavier finds an LP that Arlo recorded and the label artwork matches the rose on Hailey’s new purse. Kayla discards the mint because of its taste, but she still passes out. Dale takes her to the stable. Joan tells May to go back to the house and take care of Xavier.

Aaron, the boy at the stable who is Dale and Joan’s son, skins one of the bodies. Dale brings in Kayla and instructs his son on prepping the bodies.

May returns to Arlo’s house and kills Xavier. She then tells Hailey that Xavier asked her to babysit and that she wants to introduce Hailey to another little girl. Dale and Joan argue about raising Hailey as their own so that they can have another pair of small hands assembling handbags.

Kayla regains consciousness and flees from Aaron. After a chase, she kills Aaron with a pitchfork.

May introduces Hailey to Rebekah and tells Rebekah to teach Hailey how to sew. In the tanning salon office, Dale strangles Joan. May reluctantly agrees to turn Joan into a handbag. She tells Dale to slice off Joan’s face so that Aaron will not know that he is skinning his own mother.

While running away from the stable, Kayla flags down a car with Greg and Sara, the two people that she met at the funeral home. Greg strangles Kayla and then reports to Dale. Still alive, Kayla sneaks into the sewing room and rescues Hailey.

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Review:

Unquestionably, the single greatest drawback to reviewing low budget independent horror movies is that the job requires sitting through the entirety of something like “Slink.”  Common sense screams to turn it off shortly after the opening credits and be thankful that only ten minutes were wasted.  But a commitment to providing a fully informed critique demands that another hour and change go down the drain, too.

The opening credits warn of impending disaster with a handful of peculiar screenplay credits never before grouped together in a motion picture.  Director Jared Masters bears the brunt of the blame as the only fully credited writer.  But his partners in crime include “Co-Creator” Marc Dishman, “Collaborating Writer” Amanda McAuley, and “Additional Dialogue” by Randy Masters.  How those four assignments could hope to mesh together and bang out a cohesive script is beyond comprehension.  So it comes as no surprise that what they ended up with feels like a case where the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing.

“Slink” is the story of two sisters sent by their father to itemize their dead uncle’s belongings.  They eventually uncover a silly conspiracy in the weird little town of Wickenhaven that involves a tanning salon owner who resembles a pedophile from the evening news, and a posh line of couture purses that are actually made from human skin.

Gather up some friends and family with nothing better to do and use them to populate a cast and crew, no experience required.  That is the starting point for “Slink.”  From there, the filmmaking philosophy is simply to set each scene in a corner of a room haphazardly dressed to resemble something else and let the camera roll on whatever happens.  If actors stumble over dialogue because English is a second language, fine.  If fight scenes exclude sound effects but include phantom punches that miss their targets by six feet or more, no worries.

Incredibly, “Slink” credits a Production Designer, an Art Director, and two more names under Set Construction.  These must have been four of the plushest assignments to ever exist on a movie set.  It is impossible to imagine what they had to do all day when the property budget was limited to a $20 bill and one trip to the Dollar Store.

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        A designer boutique, a macaroni casserole, the world's dirtiest couch, and a rotary phone?

A $2.99 package of wall mount hangers from the hardware aisle at Target makes up the display wall at what is supposed to be the flagship store for $5,000 designer purses popular with celebrities.  A bowl of Kraft Easy Mac is served as a “casserole.”  A house phone still has a rotary dial on it and a couch looks like it was pulled off the street after a pack of stray dogs used it as a bed for twenty years.

Top to bottom, head to toe, stem to stern, left to right, or inside out.  Any way it is sliced, “Slink” is a mess on all fronts.  Performances are painfully embarrassing for everyone involved.  Sets look like they were constructed for a high school stage play.  The music is out of place and thoroughly obnoxious.  And the ending is one of the worst ever seen.

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                                    Jennifer Love Hewitt + Eliza Dushku = Danika Galindo? 

Had there been a tongue in its cheek, “Slink” might have made it with a John Waters vibe.  But the tone is completely wrong for the level of amateurism on display here.  The lead actress, who has a little blend of Eliza Dushku meets Jennifer Love Hewitt, spends the finale in a thong, which is a clear indicator of how low things will go to generate even mild interest in a movie that is barely a step in quality above homemade.

Telling someone to “slink” away from this movie would not only be a bad pun, it would also be understating how much distance should exist between human eyeballs and “Slink,” and how fast they should separate.  The responsible thing would be to put all copies of “Slink” in a rocket and fire them into outer space.  Then pray that an alien race never finds them, lest they take it as an invitation for intergalactic war over subjugating their species to a horrible plague.

Review Score:  15

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