Skeleton Crew Thinks Your Time is Valueless

The end credits of Skeleton Crew roll at the 90-minute mark. This will be important information in a moment.

The movie opens with a car crash, after which a woman and her boyfriend are forced to find refuge in a creepy medical clinic run by a man who, sadly, is not Jeffrey Combs.

The woman quickly realizes something creepy is going on, and tries to free herself from the clutches of the psychopathic hospital staff - while I realize that this movie has the exact same plot as something we covered on theAvod, although the title eludes me at the moment - anyhow, the point is that she gets chased around the hospital until the 22-minute mark, at which point we arrive at the twist:

Up until this point we've just been watching a movie being made.

There's nothing particularly wrong with a twist like this in general, and in this movie specifically it could have worked, except for one vitally important thing: the events of the first 22 minutes of the movie have no bearing or impact on the rest of the film. They're simply not important to what occurs in the remaining 68 minutes. Meaning that if a viewer were to come in a full quarter of the way into the movie they could watch the rest without having missed a thing.

The crazy part is just how easily the first twenty minutes of the film could have set up the rest of the proceedings. I'm not going to get into the plot here (that's what TheAvod is for), but suffice to say there's an awful lot of backstory that needs to be explained in order to get things moving. That all could have easily been worked into the first section of the movie, so that when the audience moves out of the film within a film and into the film itself, they'd know where they were. Instead of doing this, the film makes the bold, inexplicable choice to stop the movie dead for five minutes while they explain what was going on in the plot of the first 20 minutes/20 years ago in the haunted hospital they're filming at.

Which means the only possible purpose the opening of the film could have served was just rendered moot. So why leave it in?

Because the filmmakers behind Skeleton Crew believe your time is utterly without value.