The Skeleton Key (DVD)

Caroline Ellis worked as a care assistant in an old peoples home, but when one of her patients dies and the establishment treats his personal effects with disrespect and is told that she 'cares to much' she hands in her notice and looks for a new job. In the paper she finds an advertisement for a personal helper situated in the Deep South. Her patient is a stroke victim rendered dumb and bed ridden with an overbearing wife who proceeds to tell Caroline tales of their home, tales of love and murder, magic an mystery. Caroline is given a skeleton key that opens every door in the house, but up in the attic there is a strange rattling noise…….. What ensues is a quite, scary, ...  Read the complete review

I'm a sucker for a film with a twist. So it would seem are a lot of other people, which is why so many of them get made. They fall, though, into two significant categories; either great films with a twist, or films with a great twist - where both seem to exist, it's inevitably because the preamble's so good. The Skeleton Key is one of those second types of movie, where the pay-off's a good one, the ending a well-crafted shocker, but you get the impression the "twist" was pitched well before any else in the film, the plot and characters built in afterwards around the endgame. Caroline (Kate Hudson) is a careworker who, disillusioned with the monotony ...  Read the complete review

This was another film I caught on TV the other night and another I had been wanting to watch for ages. We saw it advertised at the cinema yonks ago and the trailer really caught mine and my wife's interest so when we saw it in the T.V listings, we decided to make a point to try and watch it together.... Set in the already creepy state of Louisiana, home to the bayou and all kinds of voodoo mischief if we are lead to believe what we are told, the film follows Caroline Ellis, a carer, who comes to the home of Violet Devereaux to help look after her husband Ben who is the victim of a stroke. Recruited by a local lawyer who is in the process of rewriting the ...  Read the complete review

- Credits - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397101/fullcredits - Story - A hospice nurse called Caroline answers an ad in the local paper for a couple and ends up looking after an old man called Ben Deveraux who suffered a stroke recently, at the couples rather creepy old house in the woodlands in New Orleans. The wife, Violet, seems rather peculiar from the start to Caroline, being quite snippy and enforcing some rules which seem a little harsh but she tolerates it and the longer she stays in the house, the more she notices, such as the fact that her key she's given, that she's been told opens every door in the house, ...  Read the complete review

Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson) gives up her job as a nurse at a hospital in New Orleans to work as an in-house carer in a mansion on the outskirts of New Orleans for Ben Devereaux (John Hurt), a stroke victim on his last legs who can no longer walk or talk. Caroline is given a skeleton key by Devereaux's wife Violet (Gena Rowlands) which allows her access to every room in the house. She finds her way into a secret room in the attic which contains voodoo dolls, a book of spells and other items of black magic. Violet tells Caroline that the room used to belong to two black servants called Mama Cecile and Papa Justify who worked in the house in the twenties and ...  Read the complete review