‘The Skeleton Key’ an ignorant, scareless mess

Common sense is a tricky thing in the movies, particularly horror films. If it’s a good horror film, you’d be reasonably willing to ignore any lapses of logic, because if the victims just went straight to the police, there would be no movie, and nobody wants that. But in the case of a bad horror movie, like, oh, say, “The Skeleton Key,” which is chock full of such general annoyances—particularly Kate Hudson and her irritating doe-in-the-headlights stare—chances are you would prefer that there be no movie. Therefore, you feel free to point out every logical fallacy in your mind, hoping that someone on screen will follow your silent demands: Get out of the house while you can, you idiot! Stop trying to play amateur detective and get out while the getting’s good, or at least buy a gun! Alas, the characters are slaves to the screenplay and its many plot conveniences, and your advice goes unheeded.

A former New Jersey girl, young Caroline (Hudson) works as a hospice nurse in New Orleans; after coming to the conclusion that professional hospital work has become too impersonal (because she cares, really she does) she decides to strike it out on her own. She finds an auspicious newspaper ad for a caretaker; a thousand dollars a week to tend to a stroke-addled senior (John Hurt), normally doted upon by his creepily detached wife (Gena Rowlands). The couple’s mysterious mansion has some sordid history, however, which Caroline unwittingly stumbles upon: mob lynches, disappearances and something involving hoodoo—the non-religious application of black magic. Although most sensible people would leave the scenario right then and there, a poor relationship with her father (Alert! Alert! This is called “character motivation”!), forces Caroline to feel drawn to help Ben—who seems dead set on telling Caroline... something.

Although it is a based primarily on the dark arts, “The Skeleton Key” takes a few obvious concepts from Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” complete with a sinister, run-down gas station and uncomfortable close-ups on various meaty grotesqueries (it seems that while slasher flicks must steal from John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” horror films which take place in the southern boondocks must steal from “Massacre”). Not that it’s a bad idea, of course, because in the midst of its terror, Hooper’s film fosters many, many levels of subtext. One relevant example is how it aims equal loathing at both the backwoods butchers and their unknowing victims; the counter-culture hippies are cheerfully oblivious to any world but their own, as they infiltrate a domain they can’t possibly understand—and don’t realize their folly until it’s too late. It was a powerful warning about the dangers of egotism and personal feelings of superiority—the “lower life-forms” can rise up to destroy you.

Naturally, “The Skeleton Key” throws all of that away, by presenting its story as a corruption of the innocent by the mysterious, demonic “other”: a setting where all the southerners are magical practitioners of an evil or antisocial variety, and Caroline the lone northerner is the well-meaning babe in the woods. “The Skeleton Key” carries a smug sense of cultural ascendance over the unwashed commoners, where the kind-hearted Yankees unfairly become terrorized victims—and all because they just wanted to help these poor creatures! (Shallow Caroline’s decision move from New Jersey to New Orleans to become a hospice nurse doesn’t seem like a genuine concern for humanity so much as a heaping dose of upper-class guilt.) In other words, it’s a representation of everything that “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” warned against, presented in the most ignorant way. Of course, Caroline’s poor decisions and general decadence (she’s a New Orleans party girl) may lead some to believe that she is rightfully terrorized in that same messing-with-powers-you-can’t-possibly-comprehend way, but the problem is that the film’s sympathies lie squarely with her; “The Skeleton Key” sees the character as smart, resourceful, caring and unjustly abused. Few others will take the same perspective.

Though these ass-backwards sensibilities are a definite buzz-kill on any sense of tension, the film’s general atmosphere fails well enough on that front all by itself. The visuals are uniformly flat; in director Iain Softley’s mind, darkness always equals atmosphere, without any regard for what’s actually being shown. Creaky boards and rusty hinges mean nothing to the audience on their own; still, they are nearly omnipresent and quite clearly meant to freak us out. The only aspect that seems rightly turned towards any substance of terror is the always-reliable John Hurt, who gasps and moans with pure intensity; sadly, he only has about six words of dialogue. I suppose it’s worthy to note in the MTV era that the film doesn’t feature half-second-length cuts or a constantly shrieking soundtrack, but you know a movie is in trouble when you have to praise it based on what it doesn’t do.

The film gets a few points for its ending, which doesn’t take an easy way out and remains unequivocally cynical, but again, maybe if the stupid Yank had turned her tail and run while the getting was good, we wouldn’t have to come to this conclusion in the first place. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this probably isn’t the first thing that should come to mind when leaving a horror film.