Being Film #20 for Hooptober 2023
I guess he had one more return to the Scream bucket after this, but I feel like this was the real end for Wes Craven, a last stab at an original story and his assured direction. Alas, My Soul to Take has a really nifty concept, but the screenplay lacks any real coherence, the acting stumbles more than it runs, and Craven’s steady direction only faintly appears in scattered moments through this mess of a film, which tries to blend the hip horror of Scream with his more nightmarish earlier masterpiece.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Beset with a murdering soul as well as another half dozen personalities, Abe Plenkov brutally murders his wife before dying in a blazing wreck, just as seven babies are born prematurely at that exact moment. 16 years later the seven children of the Riverton Ripper commemorate the event, only to discover that the Ripper might not be done yet. So either he’s still alive or the killer’s soul has migrated to one of them…
There really is some promise with My Soul to Take. The concept of an evil soul corrupting someone and traveling to another body upon death is interesting, and the comparisons to folklore around condors is a nice twist. And Craven has a few real solid sequences, particularly the terrifying opening flashback and the finale once the killer is revealed. It was fun seeing Frank Grillo briefly as a cop, and Jessica Hecht as the hero’s mother. As Bug, Max Theriot is solid, selling the fear and panic of being a traumatized 16 year old and then ultimately taking that fear and turning it around to survive. He has to do a few performance tricks mimicking the others in his circle, and does a great job.
But that’s about it. Other characters make no sense, or are so broadly drawn as to be mere outlines rather than actual characters. That goes double for Bug’s sister who is the school bully until she switches at the last moment in a way that feels so natural it only makes sense in order for the script to work out the way it does.
And then there’s Craven, who feels constrained and tired as he drives to the film’s conclusions. The kills are really unremarkable, settling for a weird hybrid of the Scream killer (killers?) and what looks like the Sinister killer dragged through the mud. The getup is explained, but doesn’t excuse the tired shots that Craven helped invent more than 20 years earlier. There’s also some weird slowdown moments that do nothing to propel the movie forward, and I can’t help but feel like the studios were constantly yelling “Make it more like X!”
X in this case being whatever was hip at the time, and not 2022’s excellent X by Ti West. That would be time travel, and that’s surprisingly something I don’t think Craven ever covered.
Well, I can at least say I’ve now seen every Wes Craven film. For better or worse.
Cinema Dual 
Leave a comment