Thierry (Marc Paquett), a white college student prejudiced against red-heads, and Henri (Frederic Pierre), his black roommate, visit a brothel where Henri is attacked by a red-headed prostitute. Later, Thierry falls for Claire (Marianne Farley), a red-headed musician with strange habits and a stranger family. The complications mount: Claire has cancer, the prostitute is her sister, and Henri’s life is in danger.
Low budget horror for the non-horror festival circuit, White Skin is too slow to be exciting, too drab to be frightening, and too predictable to be thoughtful. From time to time, it seems like it is going to do something entertaining, which just makes it worse. If it was just relentlessly awful, it could be fun.
I kept wondering if this was supposed to be an allegory, with people behaving in bizarre ways to illustrate a point, or if the filmmakers had no idea how people behave. I tend toward the second, since there is no point. There’re a lot of discussions of race, but they never come to anything. Maybe in an early draft it was relevant, but it just ends up as filler. Whenever nothing is happening (which is often), somebody makes a speech about blacks or whites or really pale whites, and then the film goes on, ignoring whatever was said. This tendency is at its worst early on, when Thierry and Henri lie about the attack, claiming that skinheads cut Henri. His family, friends, and miscellaneous blacks gather to make plans to deal with this hot racial issue, and then nothing happens. Most of those characters vanish from the film, and it is all but forgotten. Why stick the meeting into the film if it isn’t relevant?
Marc Paquett is a milquetoast lead. It’s easy to see him falling for Claire (discounting his weird hatred of red-headed girls), but what does she see in him? I don’t have to feel his magnetism, but I do need to know that Claire does, and it isn’t onscreen. We’ve reached new lows in chemistry.
If you’re looking for the horror element, you’re going to have to look very hard. There’s a bit of blood and some semi-tense trips through empty apartments, and nothing more. That means the drama and characters have to carry the show, and they don’t. Character development is spotty at best. The middle of the picture has no flow, but is a series of moments with the characters behaving differently in each, and we never see how they got from one state to the next.
There’s the basis for a good movie here. Adding red-heads in as a separate “race” allows for some interesting commentary, and Marianne Farley does a nice job as the girlfriend that isn’t quite right as does Jessica Malka as the psychotic sister. But they are wasted.
For reasons that only a marketing executive can fathom, it was re-titled Cannibal for the US video release. I suppose they are hoping that people will assume there’s going to be lots of flesh-eating fun, and not read what the movie is really about. Once they sell a DVD, what do they care?
It can be found in the original French or in dubbed English. The latter isn’t a disaster; it also isn’t very good, with over-emoting and artificial enunciation.