Pelts tells the story of Jake Feldman (Meat Loaf), a cranky, unsympathetic guy with a fur coat shop where he mistreats his employees, and an obsession with a stripper named Shana (Ellen Ewusie). The furs he gets are mostly sub-par, his business will never make him rich, and he knows it and it makes him miserable.

Jake would like nothing more than to have sex with the stripper but she rejects his advances, laughing at his "slaughter house smell" and making fun of him for being a pathetic old man. He, in turn, keeps promising that one day he'll make it rich and he'll win her over.

Jeb "Pa" Jameson (John Saxon), a trapper and occasional supplier to Jake, takes his son Larry (Michael Suchanek) out to a supposedly haunted place: a barb-wired property owned by a strange old woman named Mother Mayter (Brenda McDonald). Here, among ruins of a mysterious lost city, Jeb placed dozens of raccoon traps and, to their surprise, the father and son team find each of these traps holding a racoon, ready to be killed and skinned.

Once they start working on the pelts at their house, Jeb and his son realize that these are the most perfect pelts they have ever seen: all strangely identical and of unseen quality. Jeb calls Jake and offers him the furs, promising him that these pelts will get Jake "anything his heart desires."

Jake desires Shana and, in the end, these furs, sown into an incredible coat to be shown off at an important fur show, gets him the stripper's affection. She is willing to do anything to keep the coat and she'll end up paying the ultimate price - just like anyone else who had contact with the fur.

I didn't expect an awful lot from this film but oddly enough, I wasn't bored, nor was there a lot to really make fun of. If you're looking for an early Stephen King-esque film and don't mind the lack of explanations trailing along the storyline, you may just like this one.

There's no explanation as to where the old city came from, what it represented or what happened to its citizens. There's also no particular reason why racoons should decide to be the guardians of the ruins or whether Mother Mayter is just an old woman, a witch, a spiritual person, or whatever one usually is when being assigned to protect racoons which, in turn, protect an ancient city.

It would have been nice, too, to know a bit more about the character of Jake Feldman; alas, the most I learned about who he is came from the Making Of Pelts documentary in the special features.

The gore scenes are actually quite gruesome with each of the deaths (more suicides than murders) being quite unique and nasty, yet, not completely gratuitous: the son gets his face snapped off by a racoon trap, the father is being beaten to death with a bat; one of the fur workers sows her own eyes and mouth shut, and another guts himself. In essence, these are all the stops along the road of a racoon as he is being turned into a fur coat: being trapped, beaten to death, gutted and finally sown into a coat or hat.

The acting in this film is good enough with only the stripper occasionally over-enunciating her somewhat one-sided dialog. Mostly, she just goes on about how pathetic Jake is and that he'll never get any sex from her, until he shows up with the fur coat for her to model at the fur show. Meat Loaf makes a rather convincing aging business owner with little success and even less sympathy from anyone around him.

For a mindless gore flick with a minimum storyline to it, this is actually pretty good. If you're squeamish, steer clear; even for a gore film, the death scenes are quite creepy. Strangely, the film's style and Meat Loaf's character portrayal were more interesting than the story and that, mixed with the truly unique death scenes, made this film seem like a decent enough flick although the genre itself normally isn't really my thing.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD