Mysterious Skin (DVD)

Mixing pedophilia and homosexuality is always going to raise some heckles, especially in a Hollywood movie, as this film dares to do and have no qualms about it. Provocative is not the word. In general this type of sex offender is attracted to kids rather than a certain sexuality and so the link is very taboo to make. But Director Greg Araki and writer Scott Heim wants to make that connection, but in an intelligent and non offensive way, all the gay men having mustaches in keeping with his black humor approach to the matter and one of the boys molested in the film actually quite enjoying it. I have seen some risk taking acting and directing before but this is on another ...  Read the complete review

note: also appears in part on Flixster and The Student Room Mysterious Skin is a film that is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Scott Heim, and given its contentious premise and subject matter - about the sexual abuse of two young teenagers - it's no surprise that the film struggled with bouts of controversy. It also took a long time to find a distributor due to very few people wanting to figure out how to market a film like this. Nevertheless, it is a grim, but heartfelt look at the subject, examining how the abuse affects the kids not only physically, but psychologically. The film takes place in the early 1980s, with a young Neil ...  Read the complete review

Mysterious skin is a film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet, I have seen both these actos in only one or 2 things, Joseph in 500 Days of Summer and Brady in the hit tv show 24. So with no expectation how was this film for me? The film revolves around the 2 characters, one whom as a young boy was abused by his baseball coach and has grown to become a rather unstable and wrong adolescent turning adult. The other, a boy who becomes obsessed with aliem abduction theories after a couple of occasions in his younger days of blackouts and nose bleeds. Both old enough to go to college and live alone they take very different paths in life, neither of them ...  Read the complete review

Mysterious Skin is a 2005 mystery drama from independent gay cinema pioneer Gregg Araki. Based on the novel of the same name by writer Scott Heim, the film follows the lives of two young victims of child abuse in small town America. I had never heard of Mysterious Skin or even its director Araki until recently, when it was recommended to me and spoken of very highly. I decided to check it out and went into it knowing very little of the plot apart from the basic premise. Mysterious Skin has really blown me away, it's a film which dares to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to show in a film and does it in a utterly beautiful way. The film ...  Read the complete review

I’ve never been a fan of Gregg Araki yet his films have a cult fan base. Personally I’ve always found them to be bordering on offensive, featuring over the top performances, vomit-inducing visuals and generally devoid of anything worthwhile. But Mysterious Skin marks a change in direction for the director. The dark edge is still there but it’s now got some substance – the result is an unsettling, tragic look at the effects of sexual abuse on minors. Neil McCormick is a young gay hustler in a dead end American town. His hours are spent in seedy motel rooms and the back seats of cars with older men in exchange for money. His perception of love was ...  Read the complete review