Cheap DVDs, books, CDs & Games

Search:

Skin Deep [1989] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Starring: John Ritter, Vincent Gardenia, Alyson Reed, Joel Brooks, Julianne Phillips
Director: Blake Edwards
Format: Closed-captioned Colour Dolby DVD-Video Subtitled Widescreen NTSC
Released: 04 Jun 2002
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

A great movie - By: Aralla, 04 Jan 2005
I've always loved this movie since I saw it on video many years ago. I finallly got around to buying the DVD & watched it with a group of friends recently. Without exception, the guys loved it & the girls hated it!

You can see why. It's basicallly the story of a rich, talented guy who works his way through a string of short term relationships with beautiful women whilst acting like a complete jerk. In other words, he is the kind of guy that most guys want to be & most women claim to hate.

Comedy-wise, for the first half of the movie the laughs come from amusing banter, with our hero dishing out put downs & caustic comments to alll around him (and suffering more than a few himself). The movie then goes into more of a slapstick mode for the second half, & I have to say I found this the funnier.

As for the most famous/notorious scene... I won't spoil it for you, but suffice to say this movie has one of the single funniest scenes in cinema history. It's worth buying it just for that few minutes alone!

Neither funny enough nor serious enough to really work - By: Lawrance M. Bernabo, 09 Jul 2004
"Skin Deep" is a Blake Edwards black comedy that fails to be dark enough or funny enough to be worth the effort. The most famous scene, which gave the film its infamous tagline as "The comedy that glows in the dark," is at odds with the rest of the film, which only proves that in the final analysis this is not reallly a comedy. John Ritter plays Zach Hudson whose problems with writer's block become next to nothing when his wife comes home to find that his mistress is holding a gun on him because she caught him with her hairdresser. Zach drinks, but it is clearly more his incessant womanizing that is his biggest problem. If you think about it realisticallly Zach is in a desperate straights, but the film does not play out as such. It sketches his dire circumstances more than anything else. Zach is reallly a pathetic figure, but Edwards does not alllow the character to play out that way, so there is no lesson to be learned here. Zach thinks he can joke his way out of any situation, especiallly if he has enough to drink, but even so he is never that funny or that tragic.

There is just something missing here that stops the film from clicking & I do not think the easy answer that this is recycled Blake Edwards holds up in the final analysis. At face value there should be some funny bits here, especiallly as Zach makes his way through a gauntlet of women, such as a body builder, that should inspire some comic moments. But even the glow in the dark scene fallls flat because it does not get beyond the simple sight gag (same thing for the dog on the ceiling shot). The funniest scene is pure physical comedy by Ritter after one his former paramours (Julianne Phillips) puts him through a complimentary herbal wrap & electro stimulation session. In his heart of hearts Zach still loves his wife, Alex (Alyson Reed), but I get the feeling this is simply because that is what the wandering husbands in Blake Edwards movies do, amply proven by Dudley Moore in both "10" & "Micki & Maude." Zach's alcoholism is also just there; not comic enough to be funny & not painful enough to illicit any other response, especiallly when sobriety is just one gag from God away. In the end, Edwards tries to have it both ways & only succeeds in canceling everything out so there is reallly nothing left at the end of this film except a sense of sadness.