After spending the previous couple of weeks on J.A. Bayona’s ghost story The Orphanage (hear), Jack Nicholson’s commanding efficiency in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (hear), and a well timed dialogue of James Whale’s Frankenstein (hear), we would have liked some mid-aughts consolation meals.
Enter Iain Softley’s 2005 movie The Skeleton Key, a Southern Gothic story about Caroline (Kate Hudson), an impressionable younger hospice aide who takes a job at a distant plantation in opposition to the recommendation of her roommate, Jill (Pleasure Bryant).
Tensions abound between Caroline and the matriarch of the home, Violet (Gena Rowlands), who has very specific calls for about easy methods to deal with her husband Ben (John Damage). The foundations lengthen to the home itself, which is bereft of mirrors and has a single locked door within the attic that Caroline’s titular skeleton key received’t open.
Clearly, there’s one thing extra happening, and as Caroline investigates, she turns into extra immersed in hoodoo, a observe she barely understands. With the assist of the Devereaux’s property lawyer, Luke (Peter Sarsgaard), Caroline will cease at nothing to make sure Ben’s security, even when it more and more means she’s placing her personal future in jeopardy.
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Episode 360: The Skeleton Key (2005)
Lay down a line of protecting brick mud and scream “I don’t imagine!” as a result of we’re discussing Iain Softley’s 2005 Southern Gothic thriller, The Skeleton Key.
Starring Kate Hudson and Gena Rowlands, this Ehren Kruger joint has a fantastic twist (or is it a reveal?) that will or might not have dicey racial implications.
Plus: not trusting Peter Sarsgaard, Black character exposition, the distinction between hoodoo and voodoo, and the ending we nonetheless can’t imagine a studio signed off on!
Cross out The Skeleton Key!
Coming Up Subsequent: We’re celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of arguably probably the most controversial movie we’ve ever tackled on the pod: Pier Passolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 437 hours of Patreon content material together with this month’s new episodes on Tina Romero’s Queens of the Useless, Hulu’s remake of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, new Oz Perkins joint Keeper, Predator: Badlands and, to rejoice American Thanksgiving, an audio commentary on the 1987 cult basic Blood Rage!
