The Skulls review

This teen thriller is one of those movies that must have sounded great when all the cast signed on, but somehow didn’t quite turn out as well as everyone hoped. Dawson’s Creek and Fringe star Jackson is the poor orphaned college kid who needs to be accepted by a college secret society called the Skulls to carry on his law studies because one of the perks of being a member is that they pay your tuition. They also give members flash cars, expensive watches and strange initiations in cavernous rooms beneath the college (in a building with a skull on top, so how secret can this society be?), and soon Josh realises they may not be as nice as they seem.

A great idea (there are such societies at universities like Harvard), which gets a bit silly when it becomes a Firm-style thriller with lots of preposterous plot twists, but Jackson looks cool and is given nice support by older actors like William Petersen. Two very missable sequels (The Skulls II and The Skulls III) have followed, neither starring Jackson or Walker.