Review of My Soul to Take (2010) by Shiira — 13 Oct 2010

Say you're Bug's guardian; say you're May(Jessica Hecht), and you know that Abel Plenkov(Raul Esparza), the infamous "Riverton Ripper", is Bug's father. Even though sixteen years have passed, you can see for yourself that this small, close-knit community won't give up the ghost, as is the annual tradition, the town recognizes the "Riverton Seven", those inauspicious boys and girls, who by unmitigated happenstance, own birthdays befallen of the same diurnal course as Abel from yesteryear when the schizophrenic mass-murderer died in a fiery ambulance.

The accident had set his soul free. Or did it? That's the tried and true, tried and tired, and truly underwhelming mystery behind "My Soul to Take". Are the disposable teenagers getting murdered by a man or a manifestation? So you're May, you should've packed up and left Riverton the moment Bug(Max Thieriot) was born, but you stayed: you, the boy, and the girl, Fang(Emily Meade), the boy's sister(who wallops her younger brother so soundly, she seems to be avenging Michael Myers' older sis from John Carpenter's "Halloween"), even though everybody would have benefited by moving, away from all that familial haunting and corresponding retribution, especially Bug, because if word ever got out about your stepson's legacy, he'd be squashed, like a (pun deleted), pun intended.

"My Soul to Take" is hard to take; it expects the moviegoer to believe that the secret surrounding Bug's identity could be maintained in a small town like Riverton, where typically, everybody knows everybody else's business.

So you're May, you can't protect Bug from the truth about his past anymore: What do you do now? You should kill Bug, that's what, but "My Soul to Take", for some godforsaken reason, doesn't choose Abel's son as the conduit for the Riverton Ripper's extracurricular murdering, not that a killer in a Condor outfit had any chance to be an icon like Freddy Krueger, but at least it would make the protagonist more pro-active and less of a dweeb.