At the start of Skeeter, we see a work crew unloading barrels of toxic waste from trucks and using dollies to wheel them down into a desert mine shaft in the dead of night. Don’t worry, they’re taking full safety precautions: they’re wearing construction hats. As you’ll see, this movie shows a blatant disregard for safety rules. It’s as if it was originally planned as the “wrong way to do it” portion of an industrial training video, and then the producer went all Hollywood on that shit. You expect someone at some point to hand a baby a hot cup of coffee and a staple gun, that’s how much Skeeter hates the rules.
Faster than you can say “worker’s comp,” we’ve jumped to daytime, as a paunchy teen flees the mine shaft on his dirt bike. True, the skeeters (giant mosquitoes) are chasing him, but it’s important to note that they don’t catch up to him. Instead, he drives off a perfectly straight path and over a cliff. For all we know, the skeeters were just trying to return his wallet, or maybe compliment him on his sweet helmet, which reads “LAZER” over the visor. Flouting of safe driving rules? Indubitably. Murder? I think not.
But it’s time to meet our hero, Roy Boone, who is a deputy in Clear Sky. He’s standing outside of his house, in the desert, welding together some kind of industrial “art.” Shirtless. In aviator sunglasses. Listen, man, we know you’re excited about being mildly attractive in an if-Don-Johnson-and-George-Michael-had-an-ugly-baby kind of way. But you can’t weld things with no shirt on—you’re going to burn your nipples off. Or at least your wealth of chest hair.
Then he stops welding for no apparent reason and rides into town one-handed on his chopper: shirt unbuttoned, no helmet, still in his welding gloves. His self-satisfaction is so apparent that you start to feel uncomfortable. You can practically smell how much he thinks he’s a bad-ass, and it smells like hair gel, Brut, and Hungry Man TV dinners.
I watched Skeeter when I was 16, and to this day I remembered that shirtless welding insanity; I knew I had to review it for that scene alone. Unfortunately for me, there’s still another hour-and-a-half to go. There’s going to be a lot more Boone doing what Boone does best: ignoring basic sense, going shirtless with his acid-washed jeans lovingly cupping what must be the world’s flattest ass, and whipping off his sunglasses with a smirk.
We soon find out that the scumbag sheriff is in cahoots with Mr. Drake, an evil land developer who is responsible both for the toxic waste dumping and for…building a suburban housing tract. First off, I don’t think he’s committing an environmental crime by developing on land that has all the charm and biodiversity of an abandoned sand lot behind a 7-11. Second, why people would move out to this housing tract is a mystery, since probably the biggest business for a hundred miles is the Piggly Wiggly supermarket. And third, since when does tract housing involve toxic waste production? What are they building with, lead paint chips and uranium fuel rods?
But we know he’s ruining the land because the water supply is contaminated, as a man from the "Advanced Geological Inspection Society" verifies by collecting some test tube samples (and, by the look of his yellowish gray teeth, by drinking it). The water is killing the cows, and Boone's Native American partner, Hank Tucker, discovers that it's also destroying the peyote. Yes, he tests it while on duty. You see, they’re basically the poor(er) man’s Crockett and Tubbs, if Tubbs called Crockett “massah” and ate a lot of watermelon and fried chicken. It's racist, is what I'm saying.
We finally get our first death scene (an alcoholic is killed in front of his harpy daughter) and the second (a redneck, who looks like Screech of Saved by the Bell, is killed while out joyriding with his horny trailer trash girlfriend locked in the trunk). To fully grasp the horror of a skeeter attack, imagine someone is throwing cheap rubber bats at you while someone else is splattering a nearby window with Smucker's jam—your basic performance art piece, in other words. I’m not kidding about the jam; if you look carefully, you can see seeds.
At this point, you have to wonder if maybe the skeeters are a good thing. I realize that our nation’s hick towns are a precious resource—how else would Dairy Queen, KFC, Garth Brooks, and Sarah Palin survive this economy?—but maybe skeeters are just a natural predator of awful human beings. You know, like king kongs in New York and the lizard people in Los Angeles.
Two following scenes compete for Creepiest Moment. In our first scene, Hopper, the town poet/lunatic/hoarder, feeds his own blood to one of the skeeters he’s keeping in a cage. While that goes on, goofily upbeat music is playing—it sounds like Yogi’s going to steal a pic-a-nic basket. In scene two, Boone has sex with his high school sweetheart, to a soundtrack that Sean says sounds like either ‘70s porn music or like someone’s about to duel in the Old West. It was probably produced by a Casio keyboard and a twangy guitar. Both scenes go on way too long, but only one involves close-up shots of someone gently squeezing their lover’s back-fat, so the sex scene wins Creepiest Moment. Congratulations, your award is a cold shower.
After Boone is abducted by Drake’s goons, he watches them get slaughtered by a swarm of mosquitoes. “Now it all makes sense,” his partner says when Boone returns to town. Well, it doesn’t, but that’s cool. What’s weird is that by this point in the movie, you kind of get to like Boone. I mean, the sex scene aside, he’s a likable enough guy. Maybe it’s just that he’s more likable than the cast of skeezy villains, whiny women, and hicks. Or maybe you’ve got to respect a guy who’s that committed to showing off his chest, no matter how inappropriate the circumstance.
Meanwhile, love interest Sarah travels down into the mine shaft with the water inspector, where they discover the mosquitoes’ breeding pool. Being a woman, she gets trapped in a pit, as women do. To save his lady friend, Boone welds together a flamethrower. To show that he’s doing serious welding, he wears a shirt while he does it—but he’ll be damned if he’s going to button it. The flamethrower works beautifully, and as they escape the mine shaft, he blows the place up with a keg of conveniently abandoned black powder. Personally, I would be more worried about being in an enclosed space with high explosives, or being in a room full of BURNING TOXIC WASTE, than about a few large insects.
And that’s the end of the movie. Seriously. Boone pledges that he’ll stay in this town and fight Drake, who’s tried to kill him on multiple occasions now. But no one stops or kills Drake; he’s just still out there, looking like someone’s creepy grandma. No one, including our heroes, finds out about the nuclear waste. The water-inspection subplot goes nowhere. Hopper, the weird guy with pet skeeters, has nothing to do with…with anything. (I’m starting to think the director was “testing the peyote” when he made this movie.) The good guys have killed the skeeters, true, but everyone’s left miserable and hopeless and landless and under The Man’s boot. Kind of like a real small town, actually.
Well, at least Boone has a shirt on, now.
Final Assessment: Skeeter has a sense of humor; you have to give it that. And while it’s a B movie that uses jam as fake blood, it’s not as revoltingly low-budget as it could be. Don’t confuse this with a recommendation, mind you…unless maybe you’re a big fan of Walker, Texas Ranger and Miami Vice but think both those shows are a little too high-brow. In that case, what are you doing looking at my website when you could be eating hot wings and watching Skeeter?
