Post by StevePulaski on Nov 4, 2015 0:28:47 GMT -5
My Soul to Take (2010)
Directed by: Wes Craven
Rating: ★½
Directed by: Wes Craven
Rating: ★½
Wes Craven's My Soul to Take - the last original film he made before he died of brain cancer in 2015 - opens with Abel Plenkov (Raul Esparza), a schizophrenic man who discovers he is also the notorious serial killer known as the "Riverton Ripper" his sleepy town has been trying to catch for some time now. Upon killing his pregnant wife and his psychiatrist, who tries to communicate with Abel as he transcends boundaries of sanity and the opposite, he is shot and killed by police. On the way to the hospital, however, Plenkov unexpectedly awakens and slits the throat of the paramedic, causing a fiery car accident at the side of the road.
Sixteen years later, the seven teens who were born the same moment that the Riverton Ripper was killed known as the "Riverton Seven" - comprised of the timid Bug (Max Thieriot), the dweeby Alex (John Magaro), the spacey Jay (Jeremy Chu), the blind Jerome (Denzel Whitaker), the devoutly religious Penelope (Zena Grey), the jock Brandon (Nick Lashaway), and the gorgeous Brittany (Paulina Olszynski) - gather together for the town's ritual "killing" of a puppet made to look like the Ripper in order to prevent his return to Riverton. Despite this ritualistic practice, the teens begin to die off when the Riverton Ripper makes his return to terrorize the town. In the midst of this, we largely focus on Bug, who works with his close friends in order to try and prevent what seems like an inevitable and brutal death.
My Soul to Take is as boring as it is almost entirely artless; Craven trades mystery, uncertainty, and imaginative setups for an atmosphere drenched in teal cinematography and bleak visuals that lack everything that should make a horror film engaging and fun. Craven seems to reject everything that made his renowned franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream click so well with horror fans, and even his more contemporary efforts like Cursed at least narratively and aesthetically passable, in favor of focusing on a drab palette of generic teen characters and a thoroughly unremarkable story here.
In his later years, specifically citing this and Cursed, Craven seemed very fascinated with the idea of characters being spiritually pegged for certain doom, specifically at the mercy of a curse or imminent fate. Cursed was a film that followed a group of teens who succumbed to the sharp bite of a werewolf in a way that was playful, humorous, and often fun because its more horrifying elements were assisted by the sporadic comedy Craven infused in the script. It's a generally pleasant, if imperfect, film. My Soul to Take doesn't even have the audacity to develop the characters we're supposed to sympathize with nor really explain the connection of the death of a random schizophrenic to the premature births of seven babies the same day of his death. However, even if we were privileged to hear an explanation, the approach and justification would probably be so rooted in melodrama that it'd be pathetic and not even worth it.
My Soul to Take's biggest crime against itself and its genre is just is general lack of boasting anything of interest. It takes a slew of undeveloped, conventional characters and writes them into a script that doesn't treat them as people, and ultimately, functions largely in a way that emphasize the drab atmosphere more-so than anything else in the film. This is a bitter and uncommonly miserable film, with one of its only redeeming qualities being its ability to maintain a consistent degree of ugliness.
Starring: Max Theiriot, John Magaro, Jeremy Chu, Denzel Whitaker, Zena Grey, Nick Lashaway, Paulina Olszynski, and Raul Esparza. Directed by: Wes Craven.