There’s no surer sign that it’s going to be a bad movie than if Tom Arnold is billed. Maybe if b-roll accidentally catches him it could still be good, but when you’re intentionally asking him to perform, putting his name in the credits, plastering his fat face on the box, it’s fucked. Now, I’m sure Tom Arnold is a perfectly acceptable human. I liked seeing him die in Sons of Anarchy and he was fine co-hosting Best Damn Sports Show Period, but actor with range he is not. I don’t mean to claim that The Skeptic’s problems are entirely Tom Arnold based; he is merely symptomatic of the horror rot infesting this piece of shit. I know I hate a lot of things, but this is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. That fucking means something considering I’ve seen the entire Hellraiser series multiple times. The Skeptic is in the vein of a 70s made for TV movie insofar as nothing fucking happens, the acting is terrible and broader than a drag performance and you’d much rather be thinking about if Seattle’s gonna fuck up having an MLB team the second time. Writer/director Tennyson Bardwell wrote the script sometime in the 80s, completed filming in 2006 and it saw release in 2009. This is a passion project for someone who doesn’t deserve to have passion. Fucking guy should be like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, a personality-free pod that screams and points to alert others to anyone with a creative bone in their body.
The poster image that all but says “Direct to Video”.
Tim Daly, aka Superman on Superman: The Animated Series and a few other DTV projects that weren’t good, aka the other guy on Wings, “stars” as Bryan Becket, a rational asshole lawyer who doesn’t give a fuck his aunt died in the first supposed scare of the film. There are numerous indicators that the guy is a jerkface; he conceals his emotions to the extent that he believes himself to be a cold and rational person (he says he’s unemotional and his wife wants him to be emotional because she turned 40 and women am I right), he’s best friends with Tom Arnold and views marriage as a cost/benefit analysis. Tim Daly does a pretty horrible job, but that’s down to the writing more than anything. Maybe Tennyson Bardwell should’ve polished the script for another 30 years to ensure the characters aren’t 1 dimensional window dressing or fulcrums for the plot. Daly inherits his aunt’s house and I guess they were estranged because in her last few years she succumbed to wasting away the hours on supernatural gibberish. Tom Arnold’s Sully (they acknowledge Tom Arnold doesn’t deserve a real person’s name) believes in all things supernatural, including the Loch Ness monster. Dialogue about that is like 7% of The Skeptic. The best moment comes early on where Tom Arnold suffers a seizure and blurts out not to go to the room behind the crucifix. He’s got some medical condition I don’t remember or care about, but it bringing him closer to death is good by me. Seizures that cross over to the other side are just the tip of the iceberg for scares that require no imagination or budget. I’m not asking for Brundlefly—actually, fuck it, yes, I am asking for Brundlefly. Brundlefly would make this shit more interesting and entertaining. Tim Daly stays in a house, he vomits on his food to make digestible, Tom Arnold as Stathis Borans loses a hand and a foot, Tommy’s wife on Rescue Me blows Daly’s brains out with a shotgun. The Skeptic Becomes A Fly, make that instead of this.
This could be from any indie dramedy from the last 10 years.
So Daly finds out actually the aunt bequeathed the house to, fuck it, I dunno, the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum institute that studies sleep disorders and ESP. The director of Sleepytime doesn’t believe paranormal activity exists either (instead subscribing that ESP is as real as gravity, just not yet properly documented), though he keeps a pre-anything of note Zoe Saldana around so she can throw chairs at windows and bite people. The Skeptic‘s reluctance for a coherent tone means scenes can belong in one of the following categories: poorly written and directed melodramatic bullshit, strained pseudo-comedy and atmosphere and terror on the scale of a 7th grader’s diorama project. Nearly all of them are wastes of time; if I had the inclination I could cut the movie down to a mediocre, not especially effective 8 minute short. Baldwell includes the requisite fake scares, like the door that swings shut or open is actually because part of his jacket got caught on the door and the huddled mass sitting in the foyer is just Tom Arnold in an old witch mask, because that’s how you excoriate your law partner for missing a meeting. The undercurrent of everyone in The Skeptic being stupid baby people is more of an overcurrent than anything. Have babies act out the movie: better. No talking, though, fuck that Baby Geniuses bullshit. Trust me, there’s more better alternate versions of The Skeptic where that came from.
Robert Prosky’s last film. Always a shame to see someone die from complications of Hobbitism…
Eventually it becomes clear that there’s a familial connection driving the Z-grade haunting. Of course. It can’t be Casper and his three uncles (also known as the Reverse Scrooge McDuck family unit), it has to be something that probes the depths of Tim Daly’s emotional repression and mommy issues. Because The Skeptic is populated with a lot of subplots that never go anywhere, I thought the dead mom thing would be yet more filler, but it turns out to be the basis of the haunting. The film tries to create ambiguity about what exactly is happening to Tim Daly; is he truly being haunted by the spirit of his mother or has staying in the old house, combined with his alcoholic insomnia stirred up memories he’s never effectively dealt with? Something starring Tom Arnold isn’t allowed such psychological depth, so it’s more waste of time garbage to pad out to theatrical length. At first, all Tim Daly remembers about his mom is that she fell down the stairs and died when he was five. In a succession of scenes that play out like the world’s worst point and click mystery game, he learns he witnessed it and that mom was in actuality a horribly abusive monster who routinely locked him in the closet when he committed such sins as leaving a sock on his floor. The sock on the floor really is the Archduke Ferdinand for the abuse subplot; she punishes him by not letting him go on a picnic with her (me, I’d be glad, because she’d probably try to poison my food or let loose some fire ants) and he rebels by putting some of his toys at the top of the stairs. She slips on some easily noticeable toys, falls down the stairs, dies. He repressed the memory and nobody mentions it for fear that experiencing the trauma again might fuck him up psychologically, as opposed to the lifetime of emotional repression that’s destroyed his marriage and made him an unlikeable dick only Tom Arnold can stand. The thing I love is everyone‘s keeping this shit from him. His once a year therapist, the priest goblin, his family, hell…even his wife conceals the fact that he talks about his mom in his sleep. Okay, so it all happened before people had a better grasp on how to treat kids who suffered a trauma. This is basically Batman if Dr. Thompkins and Jim Gordon convinced him he wasn’t there when his parents died and that Thomas Wayne didn’t step in front of cars and sue the drivers to make his fortune. Third better alternative movie!
Think of what it’d be like to see that right before you die.
This shitpile ends with Tim Daly storming back to the house, thinking Zoe Saldana is in there (she’s invited herself to live there and help out with the ghost problem because…fuck, who cares), only to find that it’s his mother, sprawled on the stairs. He too falls down the same flight and I guess dies, the last image before the sweet release of no longer having to be in The Skeptic being that fabled picnic he was meant to take. I was watching this alone while my roommate was in the other room; he heard me start the movie and then 85 minutes later yelling “THAT WAS THE FUCKING MOVIE?”. A fucking box of Count Chocula is scarier, more complex and satisfying than the dreck that passed over so many sets of eyes without so much as a “this is fucking stupid, we should burn it so no one accidentally watches the abortion that bears our names in the credits”. I bet the motherfucker Bardwell thought he was being real clever, forcing viewers to ponder what the ending really means, that it’s some grand riddle people will be arguing and analyzing for decades to come. Is he dead? Was mom spooking up the joint to say she was sorry for the abuse? Was she taking revenge? How did the superfluous court case resolve itself? Will Tom Arnold finally find conclusive proof of Nessie? (Fourth better alternative: Tom Arnold’s Epileptic Cryptozoological Road Trip Jamboree.) It’s not smart, it’s not interesting, it’s the same marijuana cigarette “think about it, mannnn” mental diarrhea that also spawns shit like “if you think about it, Al, Tim and Wilson on Home Improvement each represent a facet of the intersection between homosexuality and masculinity”. Someone’s dead, everybody’s dead, it’s all taking place in the Hellraiser puzzle box, who could possibly give a shit.
I appreciate a crazy who goes so far as to annotate their haunting.
To circle back to my original point: Tom Arnold sets the tone early and often. (His acting performance is the same “shouting half the time” style that made him irritatingly ubiquitous in the 90s, which is to say terrible.) I don’t know who’s worse: Tom Arnold for taking the role or the production for offering it to him. Why would they ever? He doesn’t die, so that’s one less reason to hire him. It’s also a nothing role that could be stripped out of the narrative without any loss. I imagine in 2005 or 2006, Tom Arnold’s sitting in a hotel room. Beer stains on his wifebeater, the Spice Channel on low volume, an ashtray that fell to the floor three days ago, the shattered remains cradling a few stubbed out butts, greasy fast food boxes everywhere. He’s seen better days, he thinks to himself. There’s a piece of the bathroom mirror clumsily ripped out, laying on the nightstand. There’s enough of a line left on it to make things right. But maybe it’s time to end it. What have I got to look forward to? Trading lame barbs with John Salley? The mirror’s sharp enough to get through some artery. Before he can go further, the phone rings. It’s his agent. Do you want to be in a movie? What’s the part. It’s a psychological horror. So not Dickie Roberts is what you’re saying. What’s it pay? $5000 and three hoagies a da– Agent doesn’t even have to finish the word “day”. Someone Kickstarter Paul Schrader’s Tom Arnold Is Not Your Fucking Clown Puppet. The production further fucks up by not playing to Tom Arnold’s strengths. He can be either in the scum business (Sons of Anarchy) or a clueless family man boor (Soul Plane, Nine Months) with absolutely nothing in between. Give the dumbass lawyer role to someone like Jim Belushi.
This takes place around Halloween. It doesn’t actually matter, but it takes place then! Oh yeah, Tim Daly’s kid has a costume very reminiscent of the bear dog guy who was sucking the dude off in The Shining.
This shall be the last of my horror columns; alas, you’ll have to both wait a year for more and hope I haven’t succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver by then. I’ll say it’s a pleasure mainly because I’ve for the most part forgotten the stupid shit I watched under the aegis of the column. The good news is in November I’ll be kicking off my next project: Ronnie Goodall’s Monkey Movember (title subject to change to something not dumb). I will leave you with this: Zoe Saldana asks how Tim Daly slept. He responds he slept like a baby…that’s in fear of crib death. The fuuuuuck?
Count Gardockula’s Boogeymonth of Bollocks #5: The Skeptic
There’s no surer sign that it’s going to be a bad movie than if Tom Arnold is billed. Maybe if b-roll accidentally catches him it could still be good, but when you’re intentionally asking him to perform, putting his name in the credits, plastering his fat face on the box, it’s fucked. Now, I’m sure Tom Arnold is a perfectly acceptable human. I liked seeing him die in Sons of Anarchy and he was fine co-hosting Best Damn Sports Show Period, but actor with range he is not. I don’t mean to claim that The Skeptic’s problems are entirely Tom Arnold based; he is merely symptomatic of the horror rot infesting this piece of shit. I know I hate a lot of things, but this is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. That fucking means something considering I’ve seen the entire Hellraiser series multiple times. The Skeptic is in the vein of a 70s made for TV movie insofar as nothing fucking happens, the acting is terrible and broader than a drag performance and you’d much rather be thinking about if Seattle’s gonna fuck up having an MLB team the second time. Writer/director Tennyson Bardwell wrote the script sometime in the 80s, completed filming in 2006 and it saw release in 2009. This is a passion project for someone who doesn’t deserve to have passion. Fucking guy should be like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, a personality-free pod that screams and points to alert others to anyone with a creative bone in their body.
The poster image that all but says “Direct to Video”.
Tim Daly, aka Superman on Superman: The Animated Series and a few other DTV projects that weren’t good, aka the other guy on Wings, “stars” as Bryan Becket, a rational asshole lawyer who doesn’t give a fuck his aunt died in the first supposed scare of the film. There are numerous indicators that the guy is a jerkface; he conceals his emotions to the extent that he believes himself to be a cold and rational person (he says he’s unemotional and his wife wants him to be emotional because she turned 40 and women am I right), he’s best friends with Tom Arnold and views marriage as a cost/benefit analysis. Tim Daly does a pretty horrible job, but that’s down to the writing more than anything. Maybe Tennyson Bardwell should’ve polished the script for another 30 years to ensure the characters aren’t 1 dimensional window dressing or fulcrums for the plot. Daly inherits his aunt’s house and I guess they were estranged because in her last few years she succumbed to wasting away the hours on supernatural gibberish. Tom Arnold’s Sully (they acknowledge Tom Arnold doesn’t deserve a real person’s name) believes in all things supernatural, including the Loch Ness monster. Dialogue about that is like 7% of The Skeptic. The best moment comes early on where Tom Arnold suffers a seizure and blurts out not to go to the room behind the crucifix. He’s got some medical condition I don’t remember or care about, but it bringing him closer to death is good by me. Seizures that cross over to the other side are just the tip of the iceberg for scares that require no imagination or budget. I’m not asking for Brundlefly—actually, fuck it, yes, I am asking for Brundlefly. Brundlefly would make this shit more interesting and entertaining. Tim Daly stays in a house, he vomits on his food to make digestible, Tom Arnold as Stathis Borans loses a hand and a foot, Tommy’s wife on Rescue Me blows Daly’s brains out with a shotgun. The Skeptic Becomes A Fly, make that instead of this.
This could be from any indie dramedy from the last 10 years.
So Daly finds out actually the aunt bequeathed the house to, fuck it, I dunno, the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum institute that studies sleep disorders and ESP. The director of Sleepytime doesn’t believe paranormal activity exists either (instead subscribing that ESP is as real as gravity, just not yet properly documented), though he keeps a pre-anything of note Zoe Saldana around so she can throw chairs at windows and bite people. The Skeptic‘s reluctance for a coherent tone means scenes can belong in one of the following categories: poorly written and directed melodramatic bullshit, strained pseudo-comedy and atmosphere and terror on the scale of a 7th grader’s diorama project. Nearly all of them are wastes of time; if I had the inclination I could cut the movie down to a mediocre, not especially effective 8 minute short. Baldwell includes the requisite fake scares, like the door that swings shut or open is actually because part of his jacket got caught on the door and the huddled mass sitting in the foyer is just Tom Arnold in an old witch mask, because that’s how you excoriate your law partner for missing a meeting. The undercurrent of everyone in The Skeptic being stupid baby people is more of an overcurrent than anything. Have babies act out the movie: better. No talking, though, fuck that Baby Geniuses bullshit. Trust me, there’s more better alternate versions of The Skeptic where that came from.
Robert Prosky’s last film. Always a shame to see someone die from complications of Hobbitism…
Eventually it becomes clear that there’s a familial connection driving the Z-grade haunting. Of course. It can’t be Casper and his three uncles (also known as the Reverse Scrooge McDuck family unit), it has to be something that probes the depths of Tim Daly’s emotional repression and mommy issues. Because The Skeptic is populated with a lot of subplots that never go anywhere, I thought the dead mom thing would be yet more filler, but it turns out to be the basis of the haunting. The film tries to create ambiguity about what exactly is happening to Tim Daly; is he truly being haunted by the spirit of his mother or has staying in the old house, combined with his alcoholic insomnia stirred up memories he’s never effectively dealt with? Something starring Tom Arnold isn’t allowed such psychological depth, so it’s more waste of time garbage to pad out to theatrical length. At first, all Tim Daly remembers about his mom is that she fell down the stairs and died when he was five. In a succession of scenes that play out like the world’s worst point and click mystery game, he learns he witnessed it and that mom was in actuality a horribly abusive monster who routinely locked him in the closet when he committed such sins as leaving a sock on his floor. The sock on the floor really is the Archduke Ferdinand for the abuse subplot; she punishes him by not letting him go on a picnic with her (me, I’d be glad, because she’d probably try to poison my food or let loose some fire ants) and he rebels by putting some of his toys at the top of the stairs. She slips on some easily noticeable toys, falls down the stairs, dies. He repressed the memory and nobody mentions it for fear that experiencing the trauma again might fuck him up psychologically, as opposed to the lifetime of emotional repression that’s destroyed his marriage and made him an unlikeable dick only Tom Arnold can stand. The thing I love is everyone‘s keeping this shit from him. His once a year therapist, the priest goblin, his family, hell…even his wife conceals the fact that he talks about his mom in his sleep. Okay, so it all happened before people had a better grasp on how to treat kids who suffered a trauma. This is basically Batman if Dr. Thompkins and Jim Gordon convinced him he wasn’t there when his parents died and that Thomas Wayne didn’t step in front of cars and sue the drivers to make his fortune. Third better alternative movie!
Think of what it’d be like to see that right before you die.
This shitpile ends with Tim Daly storming back to the house, thinking Zoe Saldana is in there (she’s invited herself to live there and help out with the ghost problem because…fuck, who cares), only to find that it’s his mother, sprawled on the stairs. He too falls down the same flight and I guess dies, the last image before the sweet release of no longer having to be in The Skeptic being that fabled picnic he was meant to take. I was watching this alone while my roommate was in the other room; he heard me start the movie and then 85 minutes later yelling “THAT WAS THE FUCKING MOVIE?”. A fucking box of Count Chocula is scarier, more complex and satisfying than the dreck that passed over so many sets of eyes without so much as a “this is fucking stupid, we should burn it so no one accidentally watches the abortion that bears our names in the credits”. I bet the motherfucker Bardwell thought he was being real clever, forcing viewers to ponder what the ending really means, that it’s some grand riddle people will be arguing and analyzing for decades to come. Is he dead? Was mom spooking up the joint to say she was sorry for the abuse? Was she taking revenge? How did the superfluous court case resolve itself? Will Tom Arnold finally find conclusive proof of Nessie? (Fourth better alternative: Tom Arnold’s Epileptic Cryptozoological Road Trip Jamboree.) It’s not smart, it’s not interesting, it’s the same marijuana cigarette “think about it, mannnn” mental diarrhea that also spawns shit like “if you think about it, Al, Tim and Wilson on Home Improvement each represent a facet of the intersection between homosexuality and masculinity”. Someone’s dead, everybody’s dead, it’s all taking place in the Hellraiser puzzle box, who could possibly give a shit.
I appreciate a crazy who goes so far as to annotate their haunting.
To circle back to my original point: Tom Arnold sets the tone early and often. (His acting performance is the same “shouting half the time” style that made him irritatingly ubiquitous in the 90s, which is to say terrible.) I don’t know who’s worse: Tom Arnold for taking the role or the production for offering it to him. Why would they ever? He doesn’t die, so that’s one less reason to hire him. It’s also a nothing role that could be stripped out of the narrative without any loss. I imagine in 2005 or 2006, Tom Arnold’s sitting in a hotel room. Beer stains on his wifebeater, the Spice Channel on low volume, an ashtray that fell to the floor three days ago, the shattered remains cradling a few stubbed out butts, greasy fast food boxes everywhere. He’s seen better days, he thinks to himself. There’s a piece of the bathroom mirror clumsily ripped out, laying on the nightstand. There’s enough of a line left on it to make things right. But maybe it’s time to end it. What have I got to look forward to? Trading lame barbs with John Salley? The mirror’s sharp enough to get through some artery. Before he can go further, the phone rings. It’s his agent. Do you want to be in a movie? What’s the part. It’s a psychological horror. So not Dickie Roberts is what you’re saying. What’s it pay? $5000 and three hoagies a da– Agent doesn’t even have to finish the word “day”. Someone Kickstarter Paul Schrader’s Tom Arnold Is Not Your Fucking Clown Puppet. The production further fucks up by not playing to Tom Arnold’s strengths. He can be either in the scum business (Sons of Anarchy) or a clueless family man boor (Soul Plane, Nine Months) with absolutely nothing in between. Give the dumbass lawyer role to someone like Jim Belushi.
This takes place around Halloween. It doesn’t actually matter, but it takes place then! Oh yeah, Tim Daly’s kid has a costume very reminiscent of the bear dog guy who was sucking the dude off in The Shining.
This shall be the last of my horror columns; alas, you’ll have to both wait a year for more and hope I haven’t succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver by then. I’ll say it’s a pleasure mainly because I’ve for the most part forgotten the stupid shit I watched under the aegis of the column. The good news is in November I’ll be kicking off my next project: Ronnie Goodall’s Monkey Movember (title subject to change to something not dumb). I will leave you with this: Zoe Saldana asks how Tim Daly slept. He responds he slept like a baby…that’s in fear of crib death. The fuuuuuck?
Ronnie Gardocki
Next ArticleEpisode 45 - Best and Worst of Halloween Horror!