Shredded by the MPAA and savaged by critics for its connection to the Hollywood Madame, the nineties serial killer flick SKINNER peels its way onto Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Dennis Skinner (Ted Raimi, BLOOD RAGE) is an amiable and unassuming young drifter who has been moving from town to town. He takes a room in the rundown house inherited by Kerry Tate (Ricki Lake, PSYCHO MOM) whose marriage to truck driver Geoff (David Warshofsky, THE MINUS MAN) is strained by the repairs and his absence for long stretches of time. While Geoff suspects Skinner of being interested in his wife, and Kerry welcomes polite company from the seemingly sensitive soul, neither are aware that Skinner is actually a serial killer who skins prostitutes and makes suits to wear as "clothing for a divine soul." On his trail is Heidi (Traci Lords, NOT OF THIS EARTH), a victim who managed to survive but is just as damaged on the inside as she is on the outside. Dennis enjoys the game of cat and mouse so long as he can get away, but a voyeuristic hotel clerk (THE WEST WING's Richard Schiff) who has become obsessed with her may hold the key to Skinner's whereabouts over her head.

Less of a slasher flick than a take on the serial killer nineties zeitgeist by way of L.A. Noir, the film has more in common with the equally obscure STARTIME than SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Directed by Ivan Nagy, a Hungarian refugee who got his start on low budget exploitation films before landing a Universal contract and working prolifically in episodic television (CHiPs) and movies of the week, the film is obviously low budget but of an industry professional standard with a supporting cast of future film and TV character actors (the film's production predates Lake's long tenure as a talk show host). While the presence of Lords might be seen as stunt casting, it is obvious that she was taking the role seriously (somberly so), while this is one of the few genre works in which Raimi seems to be viewed by the production as serious actor and not just Sam Raimi's brother. Although the film is slickly made, and the unrated version's gore effects by KNB are nicely parceled out from a few flashes of flayed skin in the first half to all out skinless faces and skin suits in the second half, the film is tonally uneven with the clash of grue and bad taste comedy only occasionally successful (as in Raimi's "blackskin" impression that proved more offensive at the time to audiences than what remained of the gore after the MPAA mandates). Although such a film might probably have flopped theatrically and gained an audience later on video (which it did), the film became caught up in the Heidi Fleiss Hollywood Madame scandal which found boyfriend Nagy charged with pandering and painted as the primary mover behind her operation, and the film conveniently interpreted as exploring his complicated relationship with Fleiss.

Shelved due to the scandal only to be picked up and finished shortly after by Cinequanon Pictures, SKINNER bypassed theaters and went direct-to-video via Unapix (later A-Pix) and laserdisc from Image Entertainment, and later on DVD by Simitar. That edition was trimmed by roughly seven minutes for an R-rating, with only flashes of gore retained (one of the largest deletions occurring during Skinner's monologue accompanying him sewing together pieces of skin). Although the film developed an audiences on home video through the years, materials for a remaster were long unavailable (see the screenwriter interview below). Derived for a 4K scan of the original camera negative, Severin Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen looks very much the part of a nineties low budget film with clean and crisp daylight exteriors and lit interiors and night scenes with occasional grain from underexposure while the scenes with saturated lighting gels no longer look as smeary as they did on the video master. Audio tracks include English and French DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 encodings of the Ultra Stereo soundtrack while optional English SDH subtitles are also included.

Severin's extras provide plenty of background on the film and its troubled production and release history. In "Director Ivan Nagy: A Touch of Scandal" 2007 interview (20:03), the late director (who died in 2015) recalls escaping Hungary to a refugee camp in New York, winning one of seven scholarships to take an intensive English-language course at the University of Albuquerque and then attending film school at UCLA. He went from working at LIFE magazine and designing album covers to a string of independent films like DEADLY HERO before his Universal contract, recalling his television work (which he likened to "picture radio" rather than "mini movies" and how limiting movies of the week became). He discusses the film in the context of the Fleiss scandal, suggesting that documentarian Nick Broomfield fell in love with Fleiss and used his film HEIDI FLEISS: HOLLYWOOD MADAME to cast him as the villain, with clips from SKINNER as a veiled interpretation of the relationship between Nagy and Fleiss. In "Under His Skin" (14:24), actor Raimi discusses the film and the trend during that period of serial killer films, the film's effects, and his regret of doing the "Earl" scene which even he considers offensive.