My Soul To Take

Whorticulture.com Movie Review: Wes Craven's My Soul To Take

That’s enough, Wes Craven.

Look, I know people like Scream.  Frankly, I think it’s childish and certainly not up to the standards of the man who brought us such classics as Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and later Nightmare on Elm Street.  So sadly, Wes Craven hasn’t made a decent movie in 20 years.  But I’ll say 10, just because I know people like Scream.  I guess it has its moments.

So why am I talking about Scream?  Well, My Soul to Take integrates the absolute worst parts of Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Degrassi (not kidding) and total, brain melting fail.

There was about 10 minutes of good movie in this atrocity.  Sadly you can see where they were trying to go, but dear God did they fail.  They were trying to make a movie about the various souls of a psychotic killer known as “The Ripper” going into 7 premature babies born the night he died, with one of them taking on the role of the California condor, which not only eats death but cleanses the world for new life.  See, even writing it out seems convoluted.  The whole thing was like a bad teenage drama that just happened to have a murderer involved.

The only good part was the California condor presentation.   The acting seemed forced, and was just terrible, as was the dialogue.  They seemed to begin a love interest then dumped it immediately which only added to the jilted feeling of the movie.  The gore was mediocre at best.  Often they shied away from showing violence dead-on, and what kind of horror movie does that?

Character development was almost nonexistent.  There’s a girl they call Fang, who leads a gang for some reason at the high school.  None of that makes much sense, and the movie waits way too long to share that she’s Bug’s sister.  I can’t figure out why they would wait so long.  And why does she run the gang?  She basically elicits beatings from the jock kid onto the nerds by a number code system.  It just tries so hard!

When I first saw this movie advertised, I immediately thought it looked like a rip-off of Nightmare on Elm Street.  Little did I know exactly how much it would rip it off.  There was even a scene in a boiler room, complete with the killer scraping his knife across pipes for that signature Freddy high-pitched squeal.  In Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, the lead character Alice is able to ingest the “dream powers” of her friends as Freddy kills them.  There’s a line where Freddy says something like “you’ve got their powers, but I’ve got their souls.”  He lifts up his shirt to expose each of their miniature faces, crying out against the flesh of his abdomen.  So, in My Soul to Take, our California condor character (who was named Bug, therefore I couldn’t take him seriously) literally consumed the souls of his friends who died.

A friend asked me how I thought this movie would do.  It has a lot of things working for it: it’s October; people are in that spooky kind of mood.  Kids are on fall break right now.  It’s in 3-D.  Even though there’s no reason for it to be in 3-D and it was the worst example of it I’ve ever seen.  95% of the stuff you see in the preview isn’t in the movie, like the hand reaching out of the wall above Bug’s bed.  That probably would have been great in 3-D.  But it’s not in the film.  So how will it do?  It’ll probably do pretty well for a week.  But the absolutely atrocious plotline, acting, and dialogue will hurt it, and it’ll drop off quickly.  That’s my guess, anyway.

I give it a 1 out of 10.  My boyfriend said “it was worse than foot maggots.”  Go see Buried instead.  Seriously, my brain hurt and I felt insulted when the credits started rolling.