Review: My Soul to Take

Wes Craven is something of a legend in the horror genre, being the creator of both the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream series of films, as well as classics like The Hills Have Eyes and The People Under the Stairs. The last film he wrote and directed prior to My Soul to Take was Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the last entry in the Freddy Krueger saga.

He should have stopped there.

My Soul to Take has an absolutely confusing premise. A man named Abel sports dual personalities, and one of them happens to be a serial killer named The Ripper, who's responsible for the murder of several people. Fortunately, the police eventually catch up to him and he's supposedly killed. Sixteen years later, seven teenagers who were born on the same night the Ripper died are being killed off one by one.

So far, so good! Except that while the logical conclusion is that the Ripper never died and is back to wreak more havoc, the film follows the story that his soul has inhabited one of the seven and the possessed teenager is the killer. This is fine, if not derivative, but it makes the ambiguous nature of the Ripper's "death" feel completely tacked on. The mystery of the film is which of the seven have been possessed by the Ripper, but in order for that to even happen, the Ripper had to have died, which the film isn't even prepared to confirm. Someone needs to tell Wes Craven that not everything has to be a mystery.

What follows is a completely by-the-numbers slasher. People die, other people point the finger, and then those people die, too. I will admit that I didn't guess who the killer was until late in the film, but when every one of your characters is cut from the same cardboard, it's hard to tell them apart. The characters are completely uninteresting and you're given no reason to care which of them die, much less who's doing the killing. It's a shame, too, because Craven managed to assemble an entire cast of teenagers who can actually act.

When the film started, I thought I was going to see a clever throwback to the horror films of old. The scene with the Ripper in the ambulance was particularly fantastic. He springs to life from his stretcher, slicing someone's throat. This catches the driver's attention, who takes his eyes off the road just long enough to veer into a roadblock conveniently shaped like a ramp, which sends the ambulance sailing into the air. Once everyone gets their bearings, the ambulance explodes and the Ripper has vanished. I thought this was clever homage, but given the rest of the movie, it very may well have been the most unintentionally trite scene ever filmed.

My Soul to Take botches a decent premise with an uninspired execution and ruins capable actors with cookie cutter characters, ultimately obliterating any potential in this black mark on Craven's career. I can't even recommend it to diehard slasher fans, as there's a surprisingly small amount of slashing in it.

Our guest writer, Dylan Duarte, is a film lover and writer who writes for Star Costumes. He can be reached at dylnduarte@gmail.com.