Wes Craven, the famed director of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes, fails to conjure up the terrifying magic of his earlier films in his latest horror movie My Soul to Take.
People would be better off watching the trailers, which did a much better job of explaining the plot than the film itself, than wasting their money on a movie that does more to confuse the audience than to scare them.
It's hard to imagine how seeing the film in 3-D would have been enough to make up for the incoherent storyline, not to mention the ridiculously-named characters like "Fang" and "Bug" who appear just as interested in their boring teenage melodrama as in the violent deaths of their classmates.
At least the movie has no shortage of graphic murder scenes, kicking off with a gruesome stabbing and then intermittently killing off a character every 10 minutes or so. The movie is supposedly about a dead serial killer - who was also a schizophrenic, how typical - who comes back to life to terrorize a small town in Massachusetts. The film's main flaw is that it is so concerned with keeping viewers on edge of their seats and wondering what happens next that the plot is so erratic, it's actually boring.
The movie focuses on the seven teenagers who were born the same night of the death of the "Riverton Ripper" and are now the unfortunate targets of the reincarnated killer. Most of the time that they aren't being chased through the woods by a madman with a knife, the teenagers are confessing things that might have been relevant to the plot. Or not.
Go see My Soul to Take this Halloween weekend if you found five bucks on the street and feel like wasting an hour and a half in the movie theater not being scared. Otherwise, you'd be better off just renting Scream