“Power is never given. It’s taken. With a leather glove and a smug Ivy League handshake.”
– Buzz Drainpipe, watching The Skulls with a headache and a whiskey sour
Let’s get this straight: The Skulls Trilogy is not high art. It’s not even medium art. But that’s what makes it kind of beautiful. These are the movies you stumble upon at 2:17 a.m. on basic cable, half-asleep on a friend’s futon, as a thunderstorm brews somewhere deep in your subconscious. They feel important when you're 14 and mad at the world—and sometimes, that’s all you need.
This new Blu-ray set from Mill Creek is a slab of late-90s/early-2000s paranoia plastic, bundled like an old school Trapper Keeper of conspiracy-core aesthetics: brooding boys in tailored blazers, ancient secret societies, shadowy surveillance, and more skulls than your average Hot Topic.
THE MOVIES:
🦴 THE SKULLS (2000)
Joshua Jackson is the perfect vessel for misguided righteousness—Dawson’s Creek morality meets Skull & Bones skullduggery. It’s Ivy League noir in a JNCO-shaped mold, complete with rowboats, betrayal, and Craig T. Nelson whisper-shouting from a mahogany throne. This one’s the classic, or as classic as you can get when you shoot your climax inside a candlelit courtroom like it’s a Buffy episode directed by Oliver Stone.
🦴 THE SKULLS II (2002)
A sequel in name and vibe only. It’s cheaper, weirder, and somehow more fun. Like if someone adapted a college orientation pamphlet into a techno-thriller. You’ll miss the cast, but not the chaos—it doubles down on hazing rituals and discount intrigue. Pairs well with Mountain Dew Code Red and vague unease about your roommate’s dad being in the CIA.
🦴 THE SKULLS III (2004)
Girls can skull too, the DVD menu seems to shout. And it’s true—this one flips the gender script and leans fully into CW-before-it-was-the-CW drama. Think: soap opera meets eyes-wide-shut-at-the-frat-house. Secret passages! Betrayals! Enough blue lighting to give your TV freezer burn. Ends not with a bang, but a shrug—and sometimes that’s enough.
THE DISC:
You didn’t come here for Criterion-level restoration, and Mill Creek knows it. This is a value pack, baby: three films, one disc, all in compressed glory. The transfers are serviceable, with occasional digital grit that just feels right, like watching encrypted footage on a hacked university server.
No special features, no director commentary, no retrospective roundtable. Just the flicks. And maybe that’s the purest form of physical media left.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
The Skulls trilogy is less about the quality and more about the vibe. It’s for those who miss the era when thrillers were too dumb for adults but too serious for kids—and played at 1.3x speed on your cousin’s Playstation 2. It’s about that brief, glowy moment when teen angst flirted with fascist aesthetics and nobody quite knew what to do about it.
So yeah—file this under late-night watch with pretzels and regret. Buzz Drainpipe gives it 3 out of 5 Skull Rings, because sometimes, a little trash can still whisper secrets.
Next Tuesday: Man’s Best Friend (1993) on VHS—because killer cyborg dogs never went out of style.
🧠💿 Dream in terminal green,
—Buzz
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