[REVIEW] Skin Traffik (2015)

Runtime: 97 Mins
Rated: R
What To Expect: A DTV cameo con job

This movie, Skin Traffik, has a curiously similar title to another movie out this year.  Skin Trade.  It gets odder though.  The release date is also curiously aligned with the latter too.  So is the story.  Would you be shocked if I also told you both had martial arts fights in them?  What’s going on here?  What could that odd thing that we can’t put our finger on be?  Who knows.  Guess which of the two has a larger budget and has been nurtured over quite a few years.  This movie stars Gary Daniels.  I am not going to say ‘it also stars’ Mickey Rourke and Michael Madsen, or Eric Roberts.  Those are just cameos in this bait-job.  Need I direct you to this article once again?  The art of the DTV cameo con job.

In this movie, a former mercenary, or something to that effect (an enforcer for hire?  I dunno, man! It’s hard watching these things), Gary Daniels, gets out of the seedy business he was in.  Alas, he gets drawn back in, after he sees some Russian thugs/pimps roughing up some sluts.  They have to be Russian too, see.  Because you know, those damned Russians and shit.  I guess they’re the new Arabs, if you make them look evil enough perhaps your screenplay has a better chance of being picked up.  Anyway, this leads him down a path of brawls and evading hitmen sent by quickfire cameos from the likes of Madsen and Roberts.  Mickey Rourke is in there too, playing a key role.  Despite being in an extended cameo.  Rourke seemed to find the whole affair of being in this movie somewhat humorous.  I did not find humour in watching it – except for the music.

Man, that music was so crap and being shoe-horned in for what seemed like the entirety of the film.  But seriously, this movie is overwhelmingly cheap.  Daniels has some good fight scenes, but the editing left me feeling uncomfortable, as well as being terribly lit with odd camera angles.  Many times, I didn’t know who was hitting who.  When Daniels’ opponent is dressed similarly in a cluster fuck of darkly lit machine-gun editing, it saps the will.  The acting is also terrible and when combined with that shitty music that seemed like it came from an 8-bit sound renderer, the only relief for the agony is the occasional shot of unintentional humour.  This movie really feels like some guys got together and made an action movie for YouTube.

Bottom line.  This is not Skin Trade.  And it is quite fucking insufferable.