Review: My Soul To Take

Wes Craven is considered one of the modern masters of horror. The filmmaker has left an indelible stamp on the genre since the early 1970s, with such films as Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, The People Under the Stairs and The Serpent and the Rainbow. Of course, he's best known as the man behind Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street films, which stamped an instant horror icon on the world of pop culture, as well as the highly-successful Scream franchise which kicked off a new trend of self-aware slasher films. Craven's star has fallen somewhat in recent years as he failed critically and financially with 2005's Cursed and moved from horror to more straight-up thriller with the same year's Red Eye, but he has set out to prove that his horror tank isn't empty yet. He has a fourth entry in the Scream franchise set to release in April of next year and this weekend his first step into 3-D horror opens. Titled My Soul To Take, the film stars Max Theriot, John Magaro, Emily Meade and Jessica Hecht, hoping to raise Craven's visibility a bit before his next film is unleashed.

The movie stars Theriot as Adam "Bug" Hellerman, a teenager living in the small town of Riverton, California. Riverton is famous for being host to a serial killer known as the Riverton Ripper, a man who supposedly died on the way to the hospital after being apprehended by police. Bug is one of "the Riverton seven," a group of seven children who were prematurely born on the same night that the Ripper died…or vanished, as the case may be, following an ambulance crash. Local legend states that the Ripper will return one day to kill all seven kids. Now, on their sixteenth birthday, the Ripper seems to be back and working his way through the seven. Bug and his best friend Alex (Magaro), religious girl Penelope (Grey), jock Brandon (Lashaway), gorgeous Brittany (Olszynski), blind Jerome (Whitaker) and Jake (Chu) are the seven. As they try to survive, suspicion falls on Bug, with the belief that the Ripper's soul may have entered one of them.

Make sense? It's an admittedly interesting concept, but unfortunately Craven's script fails to make any sense of it whatsoever. The film kicks off with an intriguing beginning involving Abel Plenkov, the Riverton Ripper himself. However, the few moments of interest we get are fairly quickly submerged when it becomes clear that Craven has no desire to reveal anything in the scene. We get tantalizing hints of something deeper, including a psychiatrist who seems to be in on some secret, but it's a confusing mess that quickly resorts to making Abel an apparently unstoppable killer. He stabs himself, he gets shot umpteen times and still he keeps coming back. It's a stock slasher cliché that Craven exploits in the kind of way his Scream films would have mocked.

Once Craven gets the action-packed prologue out of the way, he jumps ahead to the night of the sixteenth birthday for the Riverton Seven, and things quickly go downhill. Craven makes the characters as disposable as any that his films have ever seen. He spends a token amount of time establishing a group dynamic—Penelope likes Bug, who has the hots for Brittany, who is also lusted after by Brandon, who high school queen Fang sees as a better match for Brittany—and tosses out some cardboard-thin supporting characters like Alex's abusive father and the high school principal who wants the city to move on for tourism's sake. There's a police officer and EMT who were in Abel's ambulance when it crashed and show up to look gravely concerned from time to time. But all of it is fruitless, because nothing of significance comes from it. Character quirks and group dynamics should help give us a reason to care about these characters and thus intensify the horror when they die. In this case it's just filling time to make the film seem more interesting than it is.

What makes this most criminal is that the main plot could have used the time spent on "who likes who" to explain itself better. If Craven wanted to make a simple slasher film without establishing heavy characters that would have been fine, but the plot of the Riverton Ripper and who is killing these kids makes no sense whatsoever. Craven tosses out a ton of red herrings, but he spends so much time focusing the suspicion on one character that it becomes deeply, agonizingly obvious that it's not him. The fact that it isn't him makes several things in the film completely pointless—why does he spend so much time talking to himself? What's this business with all the souls? Why is it important for the Ripper to kill these kids and claim their souls? Why is Bug nicknamed Bug? Did he really spend time in mental institutions and just not remember? And if so, why does no one in this town--in which he's spent his whole life--know the truth? Craven can't be bothered to explain—or if he had, these particular bits of exposition were excised in exchange for inane scenes like Penelope standing up to Brandon for Bug or a pointless subplot involving the principal's pregnant daughter.

Meanwhile, Craven writes and directs some of the most ridiculous, inane scenes in his long history as a filmmaker. No one would every accuse some of Craven's lesser films like Cursed or Shocker of having moments of cinematic genius, but My Soul To Take beats them all out for sheer ridiculousness. Consider as a point of evidence a class presentation, where Bug and Alex talk about the California condor. The scene is supposed to show how, after the first kill, Bug has been hit with a moment of strangeness where he becomes confident and a showman. Instead the focus is more on the silly Condor costume Alex wears, complete with puke and fecal effects directed at one of the students. It's one of the most surreally stupid scenes of the past couple of years and there is no choice other than to laugh uproariously, completely destroying any credibility of the scene and film. In another scene Craven riffs on the classic Marx Brothers mirror routine from Duck Soup which is interesting and vaguely amusing—but why? What exactly is the point? Craven doesn't seem to have one here. What he does have plenty of, on the other hand, is terrible dialogue. At one point, Penelope tells Bug that he should pray. Penelope, you see, somehow understands that the end is coming. Is she just crazy, or does she have some direct link to God that tells her the truth? When you hear her say "when things get hot, just turn up the prayer conditioning," you're pretty sure she's just nuts.

There are so many plot holes and so many obvious "twists" in this movie that it would take pages to describe them all. One plot twist involving Bug's family is so blatantly obvious that you can pretty much see it coming about thirty seconds after you've met the character. On the other hand, there is one that does provide a bit of a surprise, mostly because Craven has a brief moment of inspiration regarding the character in question. But most of the time he's too busy coming up with names like "Bug" and "Fang" or creating a ludicrous third act that involves a blind kid who can apparently climb up the side of a building to get into a bedroom window—Jerome is really only blind when he doesn't have to be inconvenienced by it—to build anything resembling tension or fear. He also makes these kids stupid to the point that they make the entirety of the Elm Street children look like Mensa members. At one point one of the characters is trying to flee from another that she thinks is the killer and says she's called the police. We see the cop approaching literally moments later, and the character who called them heads into the woods. We don't call this a slasher victim. We call this Wes Craven's own personal proof of evolution: only those fit to survive do.

Craven does understand that he needs gore for a horror film, and there is a little. Not enough to satisfy hungry horror fans, but we do get a decent amount of blood. As to the 3-D aspects of the film I cannot say, but I saw few scenes in the 2-D presentation that would stand to offer much in terms of the technology. All reports are that the 3-D conversion is as muddy as Clash of the Titans, but that is third-party reporting rather than an eyewitness account. The cinematography is decent but nothing particularly special, while the dialogue is occasionally drowned out by Marco Beltrami's overwrought score.

As for the actors who have to muddle through Craven's script, they're usually adequate though often uneven. Max Theriot has had small roles in films up to this point, including the younger version of Hayden Christenson in Jumper, Seth in The Pacifier and the son of Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson in Chloe. Here as Bug he has his moments and handles the role as gamely as most actors his age would have. He's by no means a revelation and he's unable to rise above the awkwardness of many of the scenes, but he could have done far worse. It's difficult to say the same about John Magaro, who makes best buddy Alex unrelentingly irritating throughout the course of the film. Zena Grey is bizarre as Penelope, for better or worse, while none of the other teens register except Emily Meade as the bitchy Fang, who is perhaps the most interesting character in the film. Jessica Hecht does thankless work as May Hellerman while no one else registers in any meaningful way. They are by and large completely forgettable—unlike this movie, which will definitely stay with you for all the wrong reasons.