Title: My Soul to Take
Actors/Director/Anything Worth Mentioning Right Away: This movie is the first movie to be both written and directed by one Wes Craven since 1994. That was obviously the main selling point for this movie as plot, characters and all that fell to a low, low second place.
Introduction: I got this movie from the library. All I knew about it was that it was a semi-recent horror movie that I hadn’t heard anything bad about because, well, I hadn’t heard anything about it. The Wes Craven factor upped my hopes for it, but those were quickly dashed.
Location: It takes place in a small town, and yes, there are a few different sets so, you know, it had a budget.
Plot: A crazed killer known as “The Ripper” (More like Jack the Ripper than the dreadnok really) is responsible for many deaths using a knife with the word “vengeance” on it. A man- who is a mental patient but lives in his home- realizes that he’s schizophrenic and has been unknowingly committing these murders. Great, so this movie right away paints the stereotype to me that if you’re mentally ill you must be dangerous. Way to go, Wes Craven. So this whole opening sequence foreshadows to the best part of any movie: When it says “Sixteen Years Later”. Really this whole jumping forward (or back) in time thing in movies (and television) has been done more times than, well, most of the other tired movie clichés I’m going to type about next. So seven lucky kids were all born on the same day that the original The Ripper died, which isn’t too weird but it is kind of weird that they all live in the same town. One of these lucky seven gives us the overview of every character early on, almost as if Wes Craven is pitching this movie to a studio and telling you what stereotypical role each character will be playing (Shy kid, pretty girl, jock, etc.) So one by one these kids start dying and it appears as if The Ripper has returned as a soul in someone else’s body. Since I kind of lost focus during this movie (As I’m sure Mr. Craven did whilst writing it) I’ll skip to the end. After a bunch of seemingly pointless stuff happens, two characters- Bug and Alex- have the final confrontation to determine just who The Ripper is. Alex tells Bug that Bug is actually the real son of the original The Ripper and is schizophrenic, so he’s the one responsible. They have a brief back and forth and then in one of the most anti-climatic moves I have seen in all of cinema… Alex just flat out admits that he is actually The Ripper. Bug kills Alex; his sister covers for him and makes him a hero, end awful movie.
Acting: These kids will probably never work again unless Wes Craven feels really badly about this.
Production: It was in theaters and it looked as such.
Sex/Nudity: I don’t think that there was any, but this movie jumps around so much. There was a scene in the women’s rest room, and then they were… ahh, I don’t know, probably not.
Special Effects: They were special. No, there weren’t really that many.
Overall Verdict: For recent horror movies made by classic directors, I really think that Drag Me to Hell blows this out of the water. Though this isn’t a competition, this movie features elements of Jennifer’s Body (high school aged kids being killed), Final Destination (they’re being picked off one by one for a very specific reason) and, yes, even Wes Craven’s own Scream series (masked killer that isn’t revealed until the end. It also has far too many horror movie clichés in it, the same type of clichés Craven has mocked in his previous movies. In any event, my favorite part of this movie is one simple quote that you will not find on iMDB. Basically, May is Bug’s fake mother and on his sixteenth birthday his sister, Fang, is trying to tell Bug who his real father is. This leads to a big verbal fight between mother and daughter, and after Fang is slapped by May, May proceeds to go on this sort of rant about how Fang is worthless and doesn’t ever try to do anything with her life. So the one line that made me actually look up and laugh at this movie is when May tells Fang, her daughter, “You’re still in high school at 19 because you’re too chickenshit to get on with your life”. They say only those who aren’t parents like to judge what other people do as parents, but really, that’s just poor parenting no matter who you are.
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