Review: Soul Survivors (2001)

Soul Survivors (2001)

Rated R for some violence, sexuality and language

Score: 1 out of 5

...what? No, seriously, what the fuck did I just watch? This was not a movie. It was 85 minutes of footage, a series of loosely-connected events. There are people who do things, but there aren't characters. There are words spoken, but you can't call much of it dialogue. There are goth clubs, metal music, teen soap opera storylines, and several hot young stars of the late '90s/early '00s to lure the young audience, but there are practically none of the fundamentals of an actual horror movie or psychological thriller. The "twist" ending is predictable, fails to capitalize on even half the ideas it raises, leaves behind glaring plot holes, and reveals the entire movie to be a waste of my time. File this next to movies like They and Valentine as yet another milestone representing the utter dark age that Hollywood horror movies had fallen into in the early '00s, during those years between the Columbine massacre and the release of The Ring and Saw.

The main characters are a group of teenage friends from Chicago heading off to college, the pretty blonde Cassie (Melissa Sagemiller), her boyfriend Sean (Casey Affleck), her "edgy" best friend Annabel (Eliza Dushku), and her childhood friend and ex-boyfriend Matt (Wes Bentley). One night, while driving home from a gothic nightclub inside an abandoned church, they get into a car wreck after a car full of mysterious masked figures runs them off the road, with Sean dying in the crash. Afterwards, Cassie starts having strange visions of the men in the car coming to kill her, as well as strange occurrences such as a shower drain spurting blood and a massive nosebleed in class. Together with the friendly priest Father Jude (Luke Wilson), Cassie must figure out what the hell is going on.

And honestly, I'm trying to figure out the same thing. I had a pretty good guess of how this film was going to play out by around the half-hour mark, and I'd venture to say that the general gist of it was close to the mark, but only because I couldn't predict just how thoroughly this movie was gonna drop the ball at the end. (Oh, and spoilers.) The ending reveals that it was actually Annabel and Matt who died in the crash, not Sean, and that Cassie was in a coma living in a sort of dream-world with the ghosts of her dead friends trying to keep her there while Sean was at her bedside trying to get her to keep fighting and wake up. What this film was going for might've actually been an interesting, Twilight Zone-esque story... at least, in the hands of a competent filmmaker who gave the characters coherent motivations instead of having them act almost at random, hating Cassie and fighting over boys one minute and then cheering her on at a swim meet the next. This movie is actually pretty short, but the amount of filler in it, intended to show the characters' relationships but utterly failing at such for the reasons I just described, made it an utter slog to watch from beginning to end. I felt nothing for any of the characters by the time of what the film intended to be a gut-punch ending; by that point, I was just glad it was over.

That doesn't even get into the myriad plot holes that the ending leaves behind. What the hell was the deal with Raven, the androgynously-dressed goth chick that Annabel is seen dating, beyond just throwing a creepy goth chick into the proceedings? What was the importance of the mark that was stamped on the characters' hands at the nightclub, leading me to spend most of the movie thinking that they were meant to die in that crash and had been "marked for death" Final Destination-style? That would've been a more generic film than the tangled maze of a plot that this turned into, but a generic teen slasher probably wouldn't have dropped the ball so badly and would've provided at least some cheap visceral thrills that might've earned this a 2 out of 5. It definitely would've helped connect the opening scene, where we see the masked men who later pursue Cassie stalk and murder another girl with that mark stamped on her hand, to the rest of the film. The film spends the entire film presenting these malevolent masked men, and whatever cult or somesuch that they may be a part of, as a grave threat to Cassie, only for the ending to tell us "nope, sorry, none of it even mattered!" A major plot thread, arguably the central one, gets dropped unceremoniously. Did it feel like a slap in the face how little this film seemed to care? Does a bear shit in the woods?

And I haven't even gotten into the technical quality yet. Scratch what I said earlier about how a teen slasher might've worked better than the mess this film actually was, because this film's writer/director can't even do cheap jump scares right. One of the easiest methods of eliciting a reaction out of a horror audience is fumbled more times than I can count, as evil presences don't come out swinging against Cassie so much as they just sorta... show up. In one scene, Cassie just starts running and the tense music starts playing before we even see the bad guy, and this scene is representative of the movie as a whole. The scares don't hit hard so much as they just lazily stumble in, the film thinking that creepy masks alone are enough to make the bad guys seem scary. The actors didn't even seem like they were trying; Melissa Sagemiller's mediocre performance as Cassie, and Eliza Dushku essentially playing her stock "bad girl" persona, still come off smelling like roses compared to Casey Affleck and Wes Bentley as two guys so dull and generic that I had trouble telling them apart. (If you told me, right after watching this, that Casey Affleck would go on to be an Oscar-winner, I'd have asked if you were trying to sell me a bridge in Brooklyn.) The climax where Cassie realizes the truth about her predicament is a nigh-incomprehensible mess of jump cuts, flashes between the goth club and the hospital, and hackneyed camera trickery that isn't stylish so much as it is obnoxious. It is, by any measure, an absolutely ugly film to watch, overstylized to the point where it gets in the way of telling the story.

The Bottom Line

Soul Survivors probably would have pissed me off more had there been anything of substance here in any way. As it is, it's just sad, a cheap and cynical teeniebopper cash-in made without the slightest care by anybody involved.