Skillhouse 2025 Movie Review
Skillhouse is an amateurish failure of a horror film that stars a social media “influencer,” but there is no skill on display, and the only thing I was influenced to do was regret all of my life’s choices that led to seeing this film.
Josh Stolberg wrote and directed Skillhouse, oh-so-cleverly highlighted as Kill House at one point, and real social media star Bryce Hall leads a cast portraying ten other social media personalities who are kidnapped and forced to get likes and views on a social media platform. Whoever gets the least number of views is killed in a graphically gruesome way, and the person with the most likes gets to live at the end. Legitimate actor Neal McDonough costars, and 50 Cent looks like he shot his part of the film on Cameo.
Skillhouse is amateurish directing, writing, and editing, and all of the work in this film is absolutely terrible. Jarring and dizzying cuts make it difficult to tell where the characters are in relation to each other, and they splice in the same stock reaction shots. There is nothing interesting about the framing except for how shaky it is in one sequence when a character is climbing a rockface. It is as though they never made a movie before and barely have seen one.
The acting is terrible. Bryce Hall cannot act his way out of a wet paper bag, and every character is unbelievable as a real person, which is extraordinary given that Hall is ostensibly playing a version of himself.
Theoretically, Skillhouse is a satire of social media influencers, but it has no intelligence or perspective. Instead, it is just a collection of gruesome kills, and whatever budget they had went to makeup, hairstyling, and blood effects. It is possible to conceive of this same idea as an indictment of social media companies or fad-obsessed American culture, but all of that is absent from Skillhouse.
Moreover, the plotting unfolds without any drama. The villain is revealed almost by happenstance, characters betray others for no real reason and without any set-up, and we rarely see what makes these social media stars so popular or why we should care about their fates. The acting is essentially people screaming or yelling their dialogue.
Skillhouse is an insufferable waste of time. It has no perspective or competent artistry, and whatever authenticity is garnered by casting a real social media personality is squandered when it’s clear Hall can’t act and the film isn’t using him in a unique or authentic way.
