SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET - Mark Reviews Movies

Skeletons in the Closet, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 8, 2024

We're used to people in horror movies doing dumb, irrational things, so there's nothing particularly egregious about the actions of the characters in Skeletons in the Closet. There's a certain cumulative effect, though, to those actions here, as if the entirety of the story is dependent upon these characters making the worst possible decision at every turn.

Some of those choices don't even matter in the long run. It's as if screenwriters Joshua A. Cohen and Koji Steven Sakai came up with a few ideas as to how their story might go, tried each of them out, and just dismissed whatever ended up resulting in a narrative dead end. The whole movie feels like one, if only because the actual plot is so familiar, predictable, and cheaply executed once it's finally made clear.

The story centers on Mark (Terrence Howard), his wife Valentina (Valery M. Ortiz), and their young daughter Jenny (Appy Pratt). The problems begin when the girl is diagnosed with a relapse of cancer, which has spread to her brain. Chemotherapy could save her, but Mark's health insurance from his job isn't going to cover the cost, meaning the family has to find a way to obtain $50,000 in a short amount of time.

As all of this is happening, here are a couple of things that occur, just to point out how heavily the script lays on the complications and ensures that these characters keep making them more, well, unnecessarily complicated. For one thing, Mark's job isn't only providing lackluster insurance. The guy is also laid off on the day he's expecting to get a pay raise and at about the same time the doctor offers the tragic news to Valentina and Jenny.

What does a man who has lost all financial security for the time being do in such a situation? Well, obviously, he goes out and gets a puppy for Jenny, despite the fact that his wife points out they might have trouble affording a dog even under their pre-firing circumstances.

Once Mark learns the devastating news about his daughter and the overwhelming monetary burden that's suddenly thrust upon the family, does he do the responsible thing for his family (and the dog, too) and return the pup? No, he doesn't, because the dog has to be there for a single scene in which it notices some supernatural thing in the house. This is a horror movie, after all.

By the way, Valentina is seeing a ghost, a woman in a white dress and covered by a translucent veil, everywhere she goes. Like the plot, we'll get to that later, but at first, the story just continues with Mark making bad decision after decision.

Meeting up with his older brother Andres (Cuba Gooding Jr.) who was just released from prison (The timing of all these monumental changes is quite the coincidence), Mark learns of "a guy" Andres knows. That's how Mark ends up in debt to a violent gangster. While Andres probably should have been more forthright about the ruthlessness of this "last resort," is Mark really that naïve or dunderheaded not to realize that on his own?

Here's another oddity, though: The mob subplot doesn't add up to anything. It's wiped away, along with just about every other obstacle and problem, when Andres takes his brother to a psychic (played by Sally Kirkland), who eventually puts Mark and Valentina in touch with the mysterious Luc (Udo Kier). He promises that all of the family's problems can be solved if they just write a wish on some parchment and offer something valuable in return. It's not until Luc appears with a snake wrapped around his neck and magically teleports the couple that Mark and Valentina even consider that, maybe, this might not be the best idea, either.

At its core, though, the convoluted plotting is just an excuse for some supernatural nonsense, composed of stuff that has been done many times before. Meanwhile, director Asif Akbar provides lazy jump-scares, scenes of alleged suspense that are so over-lit that even the mood isn't eerie, and visual effects so cheaply rendered that they're at least worth a few laughs. Skeletons in the Closet is junky from top to bottom, but what does one expect from a movie that spends an entire scene explaining the meaning of its common-parlance title? The movie assumes we're as foolish as it is.

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