Review of My Soul to Take (2010) by Shaun B — 25 May 2012

Wes Craven has written and directed some memorable horror movies in his time that include the infamous Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street series as well as The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left so what is there to be said about My Soul To Take? Wes Craven has penned and directed this movie and it's quite possibly the laziest horror movie of the year. The reason why this is is because Craven takes his own ideas from Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, mixes them and puts them into My Soul To Take with a change of story and characters. There were so many elements taken from both of them, it was difficult to keep up with them. The idea of the souls of the victims residing in one person was done in several A Nightmare on Elm Street movies but mostly in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master and the idea of some knife-wielding crazy person killing a bunch of friends one-by-one and trying to justify it with some crazy motive reminds you so much of Scream. Not only that but there are a few scenes that very strongly reminded you of some of the scenes in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream such as the dialogue or the places or even the characters. The story at the start was a little interesting as it started out like an urban legend of some kind but as soon as the story skipped sixteen years later, it went downhill from there and fast! The story started to become bland, repetitive, pointless and quite boring and once you get to the big reveal, you'll laugh as it's not believable in the slightest.

The story to My Soul To Take might have been bad but the characters were even worse as they ironically fit the movie title perfectly. Devoid of life or even a soul to take in the first place, the characters walk around with no personality whatsoever as all of them, yes all of them, fit into a stereotypical category. We have the strange, emo teenager as the main character, his sister who's queen bitch and her two cronies who follow her about, a geeky best friend, a sex-mad jock who is also a bully and a very religious teenager who does nothing but preach and pray. Okay, maybe the last one isn't commonly seen in movies but all of them have no personality or any good qualities about them and nobody cared what happened to them. What's worse is that the movie has a killer that just runs around killing people for no good reason. Unbelievably, Wes Craven writes and directs this and it's not his usual standard of work like Scream or A Nightmare On Elm Street as the script was messy, the characters were lifeless and the story made no sense. The movie had a good idea but unfortunately it was very poorly executed.

My Soul To Take is possibly the worst horror movie of the year and definitely amongst the worst of Craven's work. From start to finish, there were a lot of plot holes and there was no character development to be seen anywhere, none of them were likeable. The story held some sort of promise in the first five to ten minutes but soon after, it started to become a joke, the dialogue was just bad and the timing was way off making the movie more boring, making you not care about anything to do with the movie towards the end. Overall, My Soul To Take isn't scary and isn't thrilling but it is unintentionally funny in some places. I imagine that if I paid to see this in 3D, I would be disappointed. Wes Craven does have some good points in his career but this movie isn't one of them. While it might have been fun for the cast and crew to make My Soul To Take, it wasn't fun to watch.