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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Movies  |  Bad Movies  |  Take my soul, please/ « previous next »
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Author Topic: Take my soul, please/  (Read 876 times)
Fearless Freep
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« on: May 19, 2003, 03:38:59 PM »

Few nights ago I watched "Soultaker", probably known to most by it's regular appearance in MST3K reruns.

Note "Dante's Inferno" reviews this one here

Joe Estavez, brother to th emore famous Emilio, and I found myself curious about this because other then the appearance of  someone with something akin to a known name, this movie looks like a class project or something.  The production level was a bit above "Forever Evil", but not by much.  So how he ended up in it, I don't understand, although I do understand why he hasn't reached the level of succcess of the rest of his family.  In another bad sign, the writer and the star of the movie are the same person

Basic plot is that coming home from a party, a car full of young adults crashes into a tree.  The crash was actually caused by Joe, who is some sort of undead spirit who takes people's souls from their bodies when they die.  He takes the soul of one of the passengers, but everybodt else has been 'displaced'  ie, their soul is not in their body.  The souls are actually lying on the ground maybe a few hundred feet away.  No, this displacement and everything along with it is never explained.  It's just setting the stage for Joe to chase the souls around.  Once he captures the soul, the body dies.  Two of the four sould get captured really quickly, leaving the two (our star, "Natalie" and her boyfriend, the oh-so-eighties named "Zack Taylor")  to spend the rest of the movie trying to get away from Joe and somehow get back in their bodies.  Their bodies, btw, are at the hospital and are about top be taken off of life support....

OK, to sum up, this movie makes absolutely no sense.  I mean the premise has potential, sould caught between life and death trying to evade the grim reaper and get back to their bodies...could be cool.  The problem is, everything in the story is simply a IITS, it moves the story in the direction the write wanted, without making any sense.

a) 'displacement' is never explained, nor is why the characters are unconcious in the grass a few hundred feet from their bodies.  All it really means is that when Joe shows up, they are not there, and when they wake up, they think they survived the crash

b) Joe can assume the appearance of other people, like Natalie's Mom.  This again serves the purpose that Zack sees Natalie's Mom on the News on TV when he thinks she's upstairs, allowing him to start unravel what's going on.  This, again, is contrived because by prior actions, Joe would just pop the soul-sucking rubberbands on them as soon as he was in the house with them and not bother with the whole subtrafuge.   But that would be a much shorter movie.  Actually, the whole 'bad guy has good guys trapped but they don't know it but he lets them get away by not acting' happens again later in an elevator.  Again, a contrivance to allow the story to move forward because in a sensibly set of evetnts, the movie would've been very short.

c) Natalie apparently looks a lot like an old love of Joe's, from when he was alive, which causes him to pause at opportune times.  He tries to get her to stay with him.  This is silly, if Joe's ex-love was dead then Joe would know her soul is either in hell or heaven, so why Joe would go nuts over someone who looks like his several -hundred-year dead wife can only be explained in that it allows the heroes to live longer.

d) The ending...just go with it.  Running through the hospitals with the soul-sucking rubberbands trying to get Zack and Natalie's souls back into their bodies.  No logic to why it sometimes works and why it sometimes doesn't, other than for movie tension.

This is a pretty bad movie, but not really an unenjoyable one.  The characters, for the most part, are not dislikable and the action moves quickly enough that you won't get board.  It has a certain low-budget feel that gives some charm.  Just roll with it and don't think about the fact that everything is contrived.  And really do *not* think about the fact that the writer supposeldy based this on her own near death experience

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Chadzilla
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« Reply #1 on: May 19, 2003, 05:10:20 PM »

I liked this movie to, I had a little bit of a crush on screenwriter/actress Vivian Schilling at one time.  She also wrote and acted in a segment of an anthology thriller called Future Shock (I think that was the title) which starred Martin Kove as a therapist that uses VR technology to help people tap into their fears - each person has a story, which is a short film some college student made and is used as a story) where she played a woman terrorized by dogs.  Schilling has also written a novel or two.  For what it's worth...


www.vivianschilling.com

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Chadzilla
Gosh, remember when the Internet was supposed to be a wonderful magical place where intelligent, articulate people shared information? Neighborhood went to hell real fast... - Anarquistador
Brother Ragnarok
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« Reply #2 on: May 19, 2003, 06:07:35 PM »

Oops.

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