Call it celluloid martyrdom if you will, but just remember kids, we do it so you don’t have to . . .

   As a film critic, one accepts the fact that cinematic torture is an occasional occupational hazard. One can only hope that such instances will be brief and fleeting when they do arise. On that note, Stephen Carpenter’s feature is only 84 minutes. Regrettably, this is perhaps the only positive aspect of note regarding Soul Survivors, a film which strives to be as bad as Michael Simpson’s Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland.

   “Banal,” “insipid,” “dull,” “pointless,” “inept,” “boring,” “irritating,” and “unoriginal” are just a few of the more polite terms which critics have used to describe Soul Survivors, a trite (there, I’ve made my charitable contribution) Xerox of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. What is perhaps more lamentable than the cinematic plagiarism involved is the director’s inane, shallow, and cursory (three more adjectives to my credit!) reading of Shyamalan’s masterpiece atop the perplexing appearances of Eliza Dushku, Luke Wilson, and Wes Bentley, thus forcing the hypothesis that the script they were handed and signed onto was maliciously swapped for the pulp, trite (six and counting . . . ) trash which, much like the main character of the film, Cassie (Melissa Sagemiller), we find them. Moreover, it seems as if shortly after the ink had dried on their contracts, Wilson and Dushku became painfully aware of what they had obligated themselves for the former mockingly under acts as the latter exaggerates each and every stagnate line of dialogue with a thrive or undulation of the hips or neck.

   Representative of the whole mess is the film’s opening music in which a pop punk minuet introduces our teen cast. Thus, we haggardly prepare ourselves for horror-lite as the PG-13 feature attempts to defy its restrictive label via a tasteless “beaver shot,” a lesbian goth scene in a public toilet, and a ménage à trios sequence where the leads happily paint one another in a romantic comedy vein, which seems to undercut the ominous foreboding Carpenter is supposed to be establishing and developing but, alas, proves to be a gratuitous segue to a shower scene, replete with clothing on, between Sagemiller and Dushku. 

   A plot summary is asking too much because, under the circumstance, such becomes a sadistic request which asks a complete stranger to waste more of his life with the feature and thus, I won’t and, doubly, highly recommend you do the same.

   However, I will do the reader the service of ending on the note that Dushku stands center of the movie poster despite the fact that she has a supporting role in the film. If this doesn’t arouse justified suspicion . . .

 -Egregious Gurnow

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