Today I Watched...The Skeleton Key

The Skeleton Key

Review by Paul Preston

Welcome to Today I Watched…, a series of posts documenting my new challenge – watch a movie a day for the rest of my life. Keep coming back to TheMovieGuys.net to find out what I watch each day…and get my take on it.

When I see a movie that’s a new release in theaters or for home viewing, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.

April 30, 2017 – The Skeleton Key

Friend in film Julia Marchese appeared on The Movie Showcast the week after Get Out was released. We had both seen this Jordan Peele-directed horror film and Julia’s take was that it was basically The Skeleton Key. I hadn’t seen The Skeleton Key, so we made plans to see it together for me to see what she meant. I’ll be damned if she wasn’t right!

The Skeleton Key is about a young nurse (Kate Hudson) who is hired for a caretaking job at a mansion in the New Orleans bayou area. The inhabitants of the house are mysterious and so are the goings-on in the big, creepy manor. Armed with a skeleton key, Hudson can go anywhere in the house, except one room. What’s going on in there? And there’s your movie.

But Julia’s right – swap out hypnosis for Hoodoo and you’ve got a similar evil to fight against as the characters had in Get Out. To be honest, I was surprised I found The Skeleton Key for rent. I hadn’t heard anyone ever talk about this movie since it was released in 2005 and I don’t believe people talked about it much then, either. Turns out, however, that it’s a pretty tight suspense film. The plot sets up a bunch of rules and successfully lives by them (movies love to break their own rules all the time to horrible results), the tone is serious, which is to say it’s always creepy and scary, there’s no comedy character to lighten the mood, all leading to a right-hook-to-the-jaw finale.

Plus, there are upgrades to the usual casting with Gena Rowlands involved, along with John Hurt and Peter Saarsgard in supporting roles. If you can find it…I recommend it.

See Julia on The Movie Showcast here: