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Monday, March 2, 2009

Soul Survivors

Take Jacob's Ladder, put some hot chicks in it, some kickin' tunes, a lot of buff guys mumbling to themselves, and you have Soul Survivors. I could just leave the review at that, but for those of you who haven't seen Jacob's Ladder, I feel obligated to explain. This is Spoilerland, so run while you can...

Still here? Sorry to hear that. Okay, well Jacob's Ladder was about the process the protagonist goes through as he dies. In essence, the few seconds as he struggles between life and death are his purgatory. The movie follows the main character living out his life in those split seconds, and characters become symbols of heaven and hell.

Jacob's Ladder had a lot of sneaky hints, like...the guy in white is the angel. He also happens to be a chiropractor. In case you didn't figure it out in the film, the protagonist says stuff like, "You're like an angel."

Have you figured out yet that I wasn't too fond of Jacob's Ladder?

So you can imagine how much I didn't enjoy Soul Survivors, which is a direct rip off of that film. Only there's even more ridiculous symbolism from the school of M. Night Shyamalan - red is the sign of the bad supernatural guys. And yes, white's the sign of good supernatural guys. And there's a lot of sudden cuts and weird animal noises as the film hops around trying to freak us out.

Let me save you five bucks: Cassie is at a party with her other two friends Annabel (played by the I-can't-believe-anyone-hires-her-she's-that-awful actress Eliza Dushku) and Matt (her ex-boyfriend) and her boyfriend, Sean. Cassie gets caught kissing Matt, Sean gets mad, everyone piles into a car and they get into a car accident with two weird guys and a lesbian.

Follow me so far? The rest of the movie is like a funkier version of The Others, only without Nicole Kidman's infernal whisper-acting. There's a lot of confusion, a lot of symbolism, a lot of non-events that are supposed to be creepy but just end up becoming frustrating. After five minutes I figured out the Big Secret.

And the Big Secret is that Cassie's in the purgatory of her mind. Her boyfriend's actually alive (which is why she thinks he's dead) but the ex-boyfriend and girlfriend are dead and trying to drag her with them into hell. Fortunately, Saint Jude intervenes.

That's right. You read that correctly: Saint Jude. I'm not sure why. But he wears white, so we know he's a Good Guy ™.

This movie sucks. It's not as bad as say, Species 2, which was just in poor taste. It's just a poorly directed, poorly acted rip off of a movie that wasn't all that great to begin with. Soul Survivors tries SO HARD that I felt bad for the people involved in it.

And that's pretty bad.

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