My Soul To Take

I didn't actually realize this until I saw My Soul To Take, but one of the things I dig about Wes Craven's earlier films is that he never bothered to explain stuff. Shit just happened.

In Elm Street, he never established how Freddy Krueger came back to kill teenagers in their dreams. It just happened. In Shocker, he never explained the weird floating lips that let Horace Pinker jump into people's bodies. It just happened. In The People Under the Stairs...well, you get the point.

Conversely, in My Soul To Take (a truly horrible title for a film), there's so much information revealed about The Ripper (a truly horrible and unimaginative name for a horror movie slasher) and the hows and whys of his coming back, that it's impossible to ignore just how stupid the whole thing is. The fact it's all sort of dumped on you in the last five minutes doesn't help, either.

Throw in an irritating lead character, a completely by-the-numbers progression of dead teenagers, and a needless 3-D conversion, and it's a good thing Craven has Scream 4 coming out next year, otherwise he'd have to really search for redemption for this crap.

Spoilers follow...

I was actually in a good mood when the film started, mainly because it turns out the screening I went to wasn't in 3-D. I had the extra four bucks ready to hand over, but was relieved to find out it was in nice, old-fashioned 2-D. Which is great, because I wasn't able to find a single instance where 3-D would have been an improvement. There was one fake-looking blood splatter that was probably added in as an afterthought, and that was it.

The good mood continued through the first several minutes of the film, as Craven does a good job of introducing the Ripper, and I'm always a sucker for movies that feature small, lovely New England towns that just so happen to be hotbeds of evil.

Then we meet Bug.

Bug is maybe the worst horror movie hero ever. He's slow (like, slightly mentally retarded slow, not just dumb), he has a crush on the really annoying school slut while totally ignoring the smoking hot redhead that inexplicably seems to be into him, and he regularly has stupid exchanges like this:

Bug's friend: "Have you killed people, Bug?"
Bug (totally without sarcasm): "Not that I can remember."

As for the plot, I guess it made perfect sense to Craven when he came up with it, but it's hard to see how. Even breaking it down doesn't help.

1) The Ripper, a serial killer terrorizing a small town, is supposedly killed. That same night, seven babies are born prematurely.

2) Exactly eighteen years later, the seven kids are attending an annual "Keep the Ripper Away" ceremony, or whatever it was called. The ceremony is interrupted for the first time. Do you think this means the Ripper will come back?

Now, bear in mind, there is no such thing as a ceremony to keep a dead serial killer from coming back to life. The whole thing was completely made up by these kids. And since there's no way they were staying out late at night when they were little, they've only been doing this for a few years, at most. Even they don't believe in it. It's just an excuse to stay out late and light stuff on fire. So why is it such a big deal that the ceremony got interrupted? I don't know. At one point, one of the cops in the film muses that maybe they should have let the kids finish the ceremony. With cops that retarded, no wonder a serial killer was able to operate right under their noses.

3) The teenagers start dying off, as they tend to do in these kind of films. Unfortunately, the aforementioned smoking hot redhead is the second to die, which not-so-coincidentally, is when I knew this film was beyond redemption. Bug starts seeing them in mirrors and takes on aspects of their personalities, because it turns out they were actually reincarnations of the Ripper's victims the night he died and...whatever.

4) There's a ton of uninteresting filler until the last ten minutes. (Which are also uninteresting, but also needlessly confusing.)

5) It turns out, the killer (i.e., the teenager who the Ripper was reincarnated as) is Bug's best friend, who actually made himself an elaborate, heavy-looking Ripper costume in order to commit his murders. Why bother with this seemingly unnecessary step? I don't know. Why didn't he just kill Bug first and save us all a lot of hassle? I don't know that one, either.

I watch a fair amount of low-budget horror movies. And I've seen plenty that had strong enough scripts and acting, that if they'd had a bigger FX budget, could have been released in movie theaters instead of going straight to DVD. So it's really annoying to see a movie like My Soul To Take that was released in movie theaters that should have gone straight to DVD. I wouldn't excuse a movie this bad from someone like John Gulager. I'm sure as hell not going to excuse it from Wes Craven.

Script: D
Acting: C-
Gore: D+
Overall: D