My Soul to Take | Horror | rated R (A,L,V,G) | written & directed by Wes Craven | 1:47 mins
**Spoilers**
16 years after a half-dead schizophrenic serial killer known as the Riverton Ripper dissapeared from the back of an ambulance, 7 teenagers who were born that very night have persuaded one of their own, Bug, to head up a ritual they believe keeps him at bay. When the ritual is disrupted each of the 7 start turning up in brutal murders. Bug is an odd kid, bullied, suffering migraines, lapsing into spot on impressions of his friends and obsessed with California condors. His odd behavior and secret past make him the prime suspect in the killings, but is Bug to blame or did the Ripper’s soul transfer into one of the kids upon his death and their birth.
My Soul to Take is a completely baffling movie in which all of the characters say, do and believe one beguiling thing after another in a stiff, scripted, completely unnatural way. It is, what could have been a straight-forward high-concept psychological slasher flick, made unnecessarily difficult to comprehend and impossible to get behind. I’ve always respected Wes Craven as a filmmaking who constantly pushed horror into the psychological, a vehicle to pillage the darkest reaches of our mind and our nightmares. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s off, it can be a disaster and Soul is one such disaster. A good old fashioned turkey.
Before it goes to hell the opening sequence, a prelude involving the discovery of the Ripper and his dissapearance, is actually kind of terrific. It is a wonderfully bonkers extended bit of chaos that doesn’t make sense, but is bloody, exciting and viciously entertaining on a grand B-movie level. I could get behind this. Craven then uses Ripper Day and the teen’s birthday celebration to introduce the kids, a potentially colorful cast of personalities that includes the jerk jock named Brandon, the pretty blonde named Brittany, the religious evangelical, a blind kid, the school-controlling queen bee, Bug and his goth friend Alex. And then, very quickly, he starts killing them. They’re all a cut more unique then the usual teen movie cliches, but the dialog Craven puts in their mouth tries too hard to be hip. He does his best Kevin Williamson impression, but the results are embarassing, resulting in an avalanche of terrible one-liners.
Case in point, when Brittany says she is going to have her dog bite off his johnson and bury it in the backyard, Brandon responds “How big is your backyard?”. Later, Alex admits that he just killed his stepdad – like it’s nothing – hey, I just killed him, then says “It’s not normal for everyone to be killing people all the time”. The movie is full of bizarre little bits like that that Craven completely mismanages the tone of. During Bug and Alex’s condor presentation, it seems like it would be a wacky revenge set piece on Brandon. But Craven stages it like a horror set piece as if we’re supposed to fear our heroes for taking revenge on their bully. Some of the kills are kind of surprising, as Craven doesn’t adhere to the usual template. I also appreciate that he tries to turn the movie into a metaphor for a boy turning into a man without a father. But he lays it on pretty thick and then provides no insight into that angle of the story.
As it progresses Soul goes from borderline outside cliche to strange to completely insane then to damn near pull-your-hair-out, scream-at-the-screen incomprehensible. It starts spouting the kind of shallow pseudo intellectual mumbo jumbo you’d normally get from M. Knight Shayamalan. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been in a theater full of people that suddenly gave off the awkward vibe that everyone in the room was embarassed to be there since Lady in the Water. Once it heads into the climax and revelation, the movie has done so many back flips, hinting at the twist, hinting at red herrings, hinting at killers and souls and schizophrenia, that it’s enough to make your head spin off your neck. It gets SO bogged down in red herrings, in trying to out smart the audience that when the ending does finally come it is a) completely under explored – an interesting idea given about 10 seconds of screen exploration and b) anticlimactic. An ending, that in retrospect was revealed in the title and then is over before it seems to begin.
The big problem with all of it is Bug. Craven guards him and his relation to the “twist” so close to the chest we never get to know our main character. And the stuff we do know about him is just unexplained craziness. Had the supernatural angle of the film been more explored or had Soul kept up the crazy-fun madness it had in it’s first 5 minutes it might have been another fine notch in Wes Craven’s belt on the way to the next Scream or remake of his own movie. Instead it is an incoherent mess. A delerious bomb in which characters seem to say things they wouldn’t already know, nobody would actually say or just verbally try to get around clunky lines of exposition crammed in the middle of their regular dialog. My bet and hope is that what actually happened is that Wes Craven got a few pages into My Soul to Take then got the news that Kevin Williamson was on board for Scream 4 and completely blew through this project to get to that one. I hope.