Review of Soultaker (1990) by Rob D — 11 Oct 2011

The deservedly overlooked Soultaker tells the story of four teenagers who crash their car into a telephone pole a high speeds, but don't die- at least not right away. Although their bodies enter a coma, their souls remain conscious, although totally unaware of what's happened to them. Before long they're attacked by the titular Soultaker (Joel Estevez), one of many angels of death, who has come to... wait for it... take their souls. Will the teens elude fate? Can they make it to the hospital before their parents pull the plug on them? Did they hire any writers, or just mash together clichés from other horror films?

So yeah, Soultaker is basically another dead teenager movie, but without all the blood and gore. As such, it won't cause utter revulsion in most reasonable audiences, like the Hellraiser and Friday the 13th sequels did, but doesn't offer much of an attraction for goremiesters, or anyone else for that matter. The problem is that while there's nothing particularly horrible or inept about it, there's nothing very good about it either. It looks rather cheesy, none of the characters are especially interesting, and the whole thing proceeds rather slowly.

It's also not all that scary. Sure, there's a bad guy trying to kill them (although since they're already disembodied spirits re-kill might be a better term) but he moves rather slowly, like he doesn't really want to catch them. Which is odd, because if he doesn't, he'll have to give up his soul as a penalty. Maybe he's having a hard time because Natalie (Vivian Schilling) reminds him of his girlfriend from back when he was human, and he's beginning to fall in love with her. Between the kill or be killed aspect of his job, and the creepy affection he seems to feel for Natalie, it's possible that the Soultaker isn't really evil, but is himself just a victim of fate. Unfortunately the movie keeps going back and forth on this question, so we never get a straight answer.

The movie also fails to answer important question about the state the teenagers find themselves in. For starters, what exactly are they? I get that they're disembodied spirits, but what is their relation to the material plane? They're not ghosts; they can interact with their physical environment in ways like opening doors and firing shotguns, and they also appear bound by the laws of gravity. But they can't be seen or heard by other people, and I'm pretty sure there was a brief shot which suggested they don't appear in mirrors, which is all the more confusing because usually things without a reflection don't have souls. I also would like to know more about the rings that the Soultaker uses to take souls, but no luck there either.

I was unable to find much online about the production or marketing of this film, except that co-star Vivian Schilling also co-wrote it and co-produced it in hopes of starting a successful acting career. That didn't happen, but apparently she did become a fairly successful writer of supernatural fiction, so at least some good came out of this project. All in all, Soultaker isn't a terrible movie, or unwatchable, but it lacks any compelling reason for you to watch it. There's a lot worse out there, but there's also a lot better.