My Soul To Take (2010)
107 minutes
Rated R
I often discuss the weird parallel nature of certain filmmakers. By that I mean that certain would-be auteurs are wildly inconsistent in their output. Could the same M. Night Shyamalan who would write and directed The Sixth Sense also craft The Last Airbender? And could the same Chris Columbus have made both Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief? But there is no more inconsistent director out there than horror icon Wes Craven. Wes Craven basically defined the horror genre for a few decades, unleashing Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes in the 1970s, giving us A Nightmare On Elm Street in the 1980s, and then revitalizing the slasher film with the Scream series in the 1990s. Unfortunately, My Soul To Take is very much a film from the director of Cursed, Vampire In Brooklyn, and Deadly Friend. In some ways, it's actually worse than those.
A token amount of plot: 16 years ago, the town of Riverton was rocked by the killing spree. The killings only came to end when 'the Riverton Ripper' was apparently killed while trying to murder his pregnant wife. There were seven children born in that town the night the serial killer met his end. On this notable anniversary, death once again stalks this small town as the children born the night the Ripper died start to meet their own grisly ends. Is the Ripper still alive? Has he returned from the dead to wreak vengeance on the children born on that fateful day? Or has he somehow stolen the soul of one of the teens, and used them to unwillingly continue his killing spree?
What's most shocking about this picture is how unendingly dull and pointless it is. Even Craven's worst efforts usually have a certain spark. Shocker has Mitch Pileggi's over-the-top antics, and Deadly Friend has its 'you've got to be kidding me' absurdity (plus a beheading via basketball). But My Soul To Take has nothing to differentiate it from the countless straight-to-DVD horror pictures that languish on the shelf on any given week. In fact, when it comes to showing how a fearful small town is rocked by a murder spree, the film pales in comparison to the visually-gorgeous and scrumptiously acted From Within. To see Wes Craven descend back into his late-80s nadir is a tragic thing indeed. This is certainly the worst, least entertaining thing he's made in recent memory.
Maybe it's time to reevaluate the filmography of Wes Craven. Maybe in the end, he's just an uncommonly intelligent and thoughtful, but otherwise run-of-the-mill horror filmmaker who knocks one out of the park once or twice a decade. Aside from the triple whammy of Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Scream, and Scream 2 in the mid 1990s, he has generally struggled to make more than one good film in a row. Taken in that vein, My Soul To Take is not so much a cataclysmic whiff as just 'the miss' that occasionally proceeds greatness. I guess the best thing that can be said for My Soul To Take is that history bodes well for Scream 4.