My Soul To Take* (out of four stars)
My Soul To Take * (out of four stars) Directed by Wes Craven. Starring Max Thieriot, Emily Meade, Zena Grey, Frank Grillo, Denzel Whitaker. R (strong, bloody violence; profanity). Playing at: area theaters.
My Soul To Take *
(out of four stars)
Directed by Wes Craven. Starring Max Thieriot, Emily Meade, Zena Grey, Frank Grillo, Denzel Whitaker. R (strong, bloody violence; profanity). Playing at: area theaters.
What explains My Soul to Take, Wes Craven's latest dead-teenagers movie?
Did he turn this incoherent fiasco in as incomplete? Did the studio sign off on a horror movie based on the words "We can do it in 3-D"? Or has the Nightmare on Elm Street director finally gone off his rocker?
This waking nightmare is a puzzle with no solutions, a twist that isn't a twist at all. It's an impressionistic horror picture pointlessly rendered in 3-D, a movie of sketches and riffs from earlier works - scenes that don't build to anything, murders that are plot devices only and so scattered that suspense is as lacking as mystery.
Soul is a variation on the "He's coming back to kill you" formula, set in a town absorbed by the legend of a mass murderer everyone thinks drowned 16 years ago. The movie demands your concentration by not playing by the rules or making sense at all at any given moment.
Worst of all, the finale has one of those "Let's explain everything" blasts of exposition that is supposed to excuse the clutter and mess in front of it. And the one thing that finale doesn't explain is how My Soul to Take got into theaters in this sorry state.
- Roger Moore,
Orlando Sentinel