My Soul to Take (2010) – Review

I originally tried to watch this film back when it was recently released on DVD. As a matter of fact, it may have even been on Netflix at that point in time. I can’t remember, but it doesn’t matter, because I didn’t finish watching it. Hell, I don’t even think that I made it 25 minutes in before turning it off to do something else. I don’t remember if I had to go somewhere, do something, or what, but I do remember not being impressed with what I had seen and also thinking that the acting was absolutely terrible.

So, fast forward a few years, and here we are. I’m always struggling to find some new horror flicks to watch and I suddenly remembered “My Soul to Take.” I asked Dr. Briggs if he’d seen the film and also told him that the only thing I really remember about the little bit of it I did watch was that it had horrible acting. It turns out that he had watched the film, didn’t like it, and also felt the same way about the horrible acting.

I plucked the film out of my collection of DVDs and put it beside of my DVD player as sort of a reminder to watch it soon. Well, today was the day I decided to give it a go. As you can probably already tell by the review overview, it wasn’t the best film I’ve ever seen. Let’s get on with the review.

Summary

If you want to know what My Soul to Take is about, you can feel free to check out the official My Soul to Take trailer below. If you prefer text over video, you can keep scrolling and I’ll try my best to explain the plot.

… Wow, the trailer makes the film look much more interesting than what it actually is. Anyways, let me try to give you horror hounds a summary as to what this movie is about:

The film starts off with a practically indestructible serial killer, known as the Riverton Ripper, being busted by the cops. They get him into custody after shooting him several times and they attempt to transport him to the hospital. Now, as all of us horror fans know, it’s damn near impossible to successfully transport a seemingly unstoppable killer to the hospital.

While all of this is going down and the killer is in the process of being transported, there are seven children in the process of being born at the hospital. Coming as no big surprise, the ambulance the Riverton Ripper is being transported in ends up being involved in a crash and despite the fact that the Riverton Ripper’s body was never found, he’s presumed dead.

Now, 16 years later, the Riverton Ripper has seemingly reemerged in the small town of Riverton and he’s out to kill the seven teenagers that were all born on the same night of his alleged death.

My Thoughts

Wes Craven isn’t a director that’s incapable of making a bad film, as he’s had his share of those, but I definitely expected something a whole lot better out of him with this one. I don’t know what was up with him while writing and directing this movie, but it’s almost like he was suffering from amnesia during the creative process. The writing was absolutely horrible, as was the directing.

First of all, the dialogue was terrible. These kids did not talk like teenagers nor did they act like teenagers at any point during this movie. It wouldn’t hurt Craven to check out something like Jennifer’s Body or maybe play a little bit of The Last of Us, so he can get a good understanding of how to portray teenagers.

Also, the camera focused on the teens too long during their dialogue exchanges, which made things very awkward. If you have bad actors/actresses or a shitty script, you should probably try to focus the camera elsewhere, rather than getting prolonged shots of a struggling actor/actress.

The pacing was very lack luster in this film, as well. This is especially painful, because the film is 107 minutes long, which puts it 17 minutes over the average length of films. At one point I hit the display button on my remote to see how much longer the film was going to be. I was shocked and disappointed to see that I still had an hour of the movie left.

That extra 17 minutes Craven felt he just had to include could have easily been cut. The movie dragged on way too long and it felt like Craven wanted you to watch as this big mystery starts to unfold right in front of your eyes, but it didn’t work, because I didn’t care about any of the characters in the film whatsoever. I don’t give a damn how good your reveal is in a film, because if you don’t give care about the characters or the story in general, it’s not going to work at all.

I could spend all day dumping on this movie, but there’s just too much to talk about. Let’s move to the bullet points.

The Good

Nothing.

The Bad

The movie was too long at 107 minutes.

The dialogue was horrible for everyone involved.

The acting was horrible.

The editing / pacing was thrown out the window.

There was no character development. I didn’t care about any of the characters in the film.

I didn’t care about the story or the reveal, because I didn’t care about the characters involved.

It was boring.

Even the end credits were terrible. Wtf?

Final Thought

I could keep listing out bad things about the film, but I’m not even going to do that. I don’t want to expand anymore thought on the film than what I already have, in all honesty.

This isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen by a long shot, but I was definitely disappointed. As I said above, it’s like Craven had a huge brain fart and forgot everything he knew during the creative process.