Movie Review: The Skeleton Key

[Steve Miller]

The Skeleton Key
Starring Kate Hudson and John Hurt
Three of Five Stars (Four of Five Stars for RL/MotRD ideas)

In The Skeleton Key, Kate Hudson plays Caroline, a hospice nurse with personal issues who is hired to help an elderly woman with her dying, paralyzed husband (John Hurt). They live in a creepy old Southern mansion, deep in the bayou, and surrounded by even creepier villages. Caroline soon discovers that there is more going on in the creepy house than meets the eye and that the man she is tending to is more likely the victim of a magical curse than a stroke. Soon, this young non-believer is drawn into a world of folk-magic, curses, and southern discomfort!

The Skeleton Key does a nice job of drawing the viewers into the strange environment into which Caroline enters, and it does a fine job of keeping us interested through pacing and building suspense... but only if the viewers are willing to accept the fact that everything Caroline does is dictated by plot concerns and horror movie "stupid character" chiches.

The Skeleton Key is yet another paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller--there's not much new here. It could almost have been a neat film like Cursed except that it uses too many of the cliched elements badly. Caroline's behavior and actions is the most glaring of these. The "twist ending" is also so well-worn that I can't comment on it without spoiling the entire movie... but I could have done without it.

This is a good movie to turn to if you want to grab ideas for Ravenlof, MotRD, or any other horror RPG. RPGs are all about applying cliches and evoking mood and setting, and this film presents DMs (and perhaps even players) a host of easily applied elements that he can import. (The content of the mysterious locked room in the creepy manor house by itself might be worth the price of admission for DMs paying attention. Just go to a matine screening!)