Johnny Skidmarks

1998 "A crash course in crime."
5.5| 1h36m| R| en| More Info
Released: 18 January 1998 Released
Producted By: CFP
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

Johnny Scardino is working for blackmailers, photographing wealthy guys in seedy motels. One such assignment turns the wrong way and blackmailers die one by one. Is Johnny the next on the list?

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Reviews

Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
Supelice Dreadfully Boring
ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.
Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
lastliberal Sometimes when you are rooting around the bargain bin, you can find an overlooked gem. A look at the cast here tells you that it has to be worth something, and with a tile like Skidmarks, there has to be something interesting.Sure, it is not the best work of these fine performers, but it is certainly worth your time.Peter Gallagher (Short Cuts, American beauty) plays a police photographer, who moonlights catching people with hookers so his partners can blackmail them. Sort of like Danny DeVito in L.A. Confidential. He hooks up with Frances McDormand (Fargo, North County), an alcoholic who is trying to dry out.When his partners start dying all around him, you have to believe McDormand is involved as her father is on TV stating that he has never cheated. We know differently, and so does Gallagher. But, that's a red herring, and the killer comes from a place you never suspect.Jack Black (The School of Rock) provides comic relief as the ex-brother-in-law, and John Lithgow (Terms of Endearment, The World According to Garp) provides the exciting finish. Charlie Spradling provides the eye candy.
litgeekgrrl I found Skidmarks absolutely compelling. Peter Gallagher plays a crime-scene photographer with a sideline of blackmailing men who take his prostitute friend to motels. Gallagher, whom I've not much liked in other movies, does a terrific job as the numb, depressed antihero, unaffected by the crime scenes and accident scenes he photographs until his fellow blackmailers start turning up as victims. The movie is full of deadpanned quips and black humor (e.g., the exchange between McDormand and Gallagher when she's trying to pick him up in a hamburger joint. McDormand, cool and tough: "Do you have a name?" Gallagher: "Yeah. Do you?") The film is not flashy enough ever to have made it big, but the plot and characters are utterly original and the acting is uniformly excellent.
Elswet This movie is an extremely uneven execution of a dark comedy. At least, it aspires to be a dark comedy, but honestly I am still waiting for the comedic parts. While it does have some good elements, they are completely lost in the horrid acting, tepid direction, and lame comedic attempts. The comedy is added as an almost after-thought to the failed attempt to create an even passable action movie.There are not words for how detestable this attempt really is. It plods on, out of step with itself, just wearing you down with bad timing, incredibly amateurish performances and dull witted humor.I bought this at a video store closing for 50 cents, so I'm not out much, considering I made 45 good purchases otherwise, but I still found myself wanting my 50 cents back.Really. Shave your dog, rearrange your garage, or pluck those pesky nose hairs with a tweezer rather than watching this really disgusting production.If I HAVE to rate this, it's a 1.3/10 from...the Fiend :.
Digger-8 This is a really interesting movie that I thoroughly dug and enjoyed. It's part intense character study, part paranoid suspense-thriller, part chase movie. The setup is this: John Scardino is a police crime & accident scene photog who is emotionally numb inside and moonlights as the lens man for an extortion ring, taking dirty snaps of compromised businessmen in their undies with a saucy hooker named Lorraine in sleazy motel rooms. Suddenly, Scardino starts seeing the blackmail crew from his night job turning up as corpses in his day job in seemingly unrelated homicides. Scardino is the only one who notices the connection, but he can't say squat without revealing his involvement in a criminal enterprise! He rediscovers his emotional inner self by getting major league heebie-jeebies trying to figure out who the killer is. He's taken so many snaps over the years, it could be just about anybody. No one can be trusted! Halfway through, the movie explodes open and turns really grisly and intense--be prepared!The acting--by Peter Gallagher, Frances McDormand, John Lithgow, Jack Black, Geoffrey Lower, John Kapelos, Charlie Spradling and Lee Arenberg--is great and infinitely diggable. The dialogue is really wry and darkly funny, as is the music. And the movie's look has a kind of Edward Hopper-film noir thing going that I also really dug.Not a lot of people saw this flick when it first came out. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, then went straight to HBO. Which is weird, because it's so good. This one's a real find. Go forth and dig it!--Richard Terhune, The Movie Digger