My Soul To Take was painful to watch. It was horrendous. I’m a Wes Craven fan and this is the first movie that he has written and directed since Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994 so I had some hope. I was hoping for something a little better than bad but this was worse than I expected…much worse…and I had low expectations.
First, let’s address the three-dimensional elephant in the room…this movie was converted to 3D rather than being shot with 3D cameras. I’m actually pissed that the studio would do this to moviegoers. If you can, watch the movie in 2D and protest the 3D distribution for it’s a total waste of money. If you do go see it in 3D, just take off your glasses…trust me, it’s better without the glasses. There may be one or two scenes (which aren’t even important) where you’re actually reminded the movie is in 3D and then you forget again once they’re over.
This looks like a straight to DVD movie...in 3D.
The story is, believe it or not, original which is hard to come by in this current movie system. However, it’s not any good. It’s a mishmash of other campfire horror stories and legendary myths. Craven tries to create a new bogeyman and eclectic group of kids kind of like Freddy movies but fails horribly. The story has so many plot holes and boring subplots that you don’t even gain interest enough to lose it. There is a pretty good “gotcha” twist but it was more pertinent to the mean girls storyline than the horror story.
A few of the Riverton 7
My Soul To Take is about a schizophrenic man who doesn’t even know he’s murdering people. Once he figures it out, his other personalities turn him in beginning a night that ends in many more deaths. However, in Haiti, they don’t believe in multiple personalities…they believe in multiple souls. What’s the difference? Souls don’t die with the host and transfer to something else. Is this movie set in Haiti? No, but that doesn’t matter… So on the night where he is caught, seven babies are born premature and the legend is that when the serial killer died, each of his personalities wound up in each of the seven newborn babies…even the bad one. However, before he died, the ambulance crashed and he may have escaped or drowned in the river. Nobody knows.
Why did I sign on to this movie!?
Sixteen years later, we get a teenage horror movie which is as juvenile as its actors. The acting sucked. The killing scenes sucked. And except for a few comedic lines, the script sucked. I really couldn’t find anything good to say about this movie other than it will probably never have a sequel unlike most of the other projects Wes Craven has done. Hopefully this is just a way for him to dust off his old writing methods and realize how bad this movie was to get inspired and make something great next time. But if this is any indication on what he’s doing now…I don’t want to see his influence over Scream 4.
Tags: My Soul To Take, Wes Craven
Matthew Fong created advancescreenings.com and is the lead contributor. He watches every type of movie and will try almost anything twice. You can follow him on twitter here: @matthewfong
