Jimmy Skinford is a wisecracking petty thief who has run afoul of the mob. We join his story in medias res, him being forced by gangstas to dig his own grave. He accidentally unearths a woman buried in the ground (!), still alive (such as she is). She’s Zophia, who has been interred for being a witch. She has the power of immortality, which turns out to be handy to get Jimmy out of his fix. This leaves our hapless protagonist and his beautiful companion naked and bravely venturing forward.
That’s how Part One starts.
Jimmy is in the petty thief business because his father, himself a crime kingpin, is dying of cancer and in need of expensive care. This will lead Jimmy on adventures that are proudly in the pulp mold, featuring gangland figures, demonic children, traps, seductions, fancy dancers, and faces blown off and rebuilt. Jimmy will be brutalized, drowned, hung, spun, and left out to dry while Zophia pursues a mission of her own.
The action of Skinford Part 1: Death Sentence is mostly earthbound, concerned not least with a bevy of women kept in cages, tortured, and trafficked.
Part Two, otherwise known as Skinford: The Curse, goes down fresh horror-thriller avenues, pushing immortality — the having and bestowing of it — into supernatural territory. It introduces new characters and stretches the pulp concept into the underground club scene.
Skinford is a walking, talking, blood-spattered comic book (or, pardon me, “graphic novel”) of a movie, and, surprisingly, it isn’t based on one. It’s reminiscent of Frank Miller’s Sin City (and Robert Rodriguez’s film of it) in its lurid edge. Skinford springs cinematically full-blown from the imagination of Nik Kacevski, who proudly lists his creds as director, writer, and visual effects. He has several shorts to his credit; the Skinford saga is his first feature-length vision.
Where do you start with Jimmy Skinford? The Curse (2018) is the sequel to Skinford: Death Sentence (2017), and it too ends on a cliffhanger, suggesting a Chapter 3 which, seven years on, has yet to be made. COVID-19 intervened, judging from the dates, and the distributor says funding glitches followed. But scripts are written, waiting for the green light.
The 2025 re-release is to new markets, including the US, that have not yet experienced Skinford’s crazy grandeur. It’s Australian in origin and features young Aussie actors who keep things interesting. Joshua Brennan plays Jimmy with scruffy charm. Charlotte Best makes a sexy and surprisingly demure Zophia. Ric Herbert is Jimmy’s father, Guy, grizzled and irrepressible, and while ill, still very much in the gangster game. Jess Bush plays Helen, whose friend-or-foe role has yet to be determined.
As ambitious as the series is, however, it often settles into TV blocking and soap opera plotting. Some scenes go on for too long. Sets suffer from underdressing and undercooked effects.
Are the two parts of Skinford worth watching, even as you’re aware that the story is short-sheeted? Sure. The action is high velocity, the people are pretty, and if bloody, occult fantasy is your thing, it more than fills the bill.
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Skinford: The Curse, Chapter Two. Directed by Nik Kacevski. 2018, released in the US in 2025. On Tubi and Amazon Prime. Runtime 86 minutes.