Customer Reviews

Soul Survivors [VHS]

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(51)

 

 

This movie gets a bad rap for a couple of reasons. It's sort of a cheesy horror movie, and some people feel it's a cheat. But I don't grade movies like this against movies like "Schindler's List" or "Shawshank Redemption." I grade them on what they're trying to do and how successful there are. This movie doesn't have a lofty aim or a lot of ambition, so I'm not going to rip it apart for not being high art. It does what it wants to quite well.

Personally, I thought this was a better horror movie than any of the House of The Dead, Jeepers Creepers, Alone In The Dark, or House of 1000 Corpses bottom feeders. And to be totally honest, this movie has far fewer cheats in its explanations and mechanisms than say, "Momento" or "Mullholland Drive." So I don't see what people are complaining about. If this were a David Lynch movie, people wouldn't be crying that the movie makes no sense, they'd be lauding how subtle and brilliant it is for not "spoon-feeding you all the answers." But I digress.

Soul Survivors is about a college girl who loses her boyfriend in a car crash coming home from a rave with her friends. She's heartbroken. Then weird things start to happen. Crazy looking guys chase her around, then vanish. Her dead boyfriend begins to visit her with eerie messages. The plot thickens from there, and of course all is not what it seems.

Personally, I think this is a pretty entertaining and interesting movie. The casting is very good. Melissa Sagemiller makes a good lead character, Luke Wilson is great as the sympathetic priest, Wes Bentley is good as the ostensibly nice but somewhat sinister friend, Eliza Dushku may never have been more gorgeous in her entire career as the wild child best friend who is of little help to her grieving friend and gets involved in some pretty strange situations. The setting for the rave that is revisited a few times is also gorgeous.

I could go on and on, but in short, I think this is a good movie that achieves what it sets out to. It doesn't have half as many cheats as more artistic and ambitious movies, the casting and setting are great, and you could do a lot worse in this genre. 4 stars.

I'd read so many bad reviews of Soul Survivors, but the plot sounded intriguing...like it was right up my alley. It's certainly not the best movie I've ever seen in any genre, but it was entertaining. It kind of reminded me of Vanilla Sky meets the Sixth Sense, if that helps. I found it for $5.50 at Wal-Mart so if you're into thriller/horror type movies, you can't miss for a price like that. It's something I'll definitely watch again and again. If you're still unsure, try renting it first. It was a pleasant surprise for me.

This movie has a good premise but is SOO confusing! I watched it like 3 times and still dont get it. I will admit that the only reason why I watched this movie in the first place is because of my beloved Eliza Dushku :) But its acutally not a bad movie. You really have to think and concentrate when you watch this.

At first I was almost afraid to watch it after reading all the bad reviews, but truth be told, I liked it. The true is that I have no clue who died and who lived, but I consider it a very enjoyable movie.

Four friends get in a horrible car accident and three of of them survive, and one doesn't. Then Cassie, the main character, begins seeing the dead friend, well her boyfriend, around campus and around town, and she begins having strange visions. But her dead boyfriend is the one who is drawing her closer to the light and closer to the truth, it is the two other friends that draw her further away and closer to the dark side.

This film is just incredible! It is scary, very suspenceful and the ending is just purely shocking! All the cast gives great performances, especially Melissa Sagemiller as Cassie and Eliza (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Bring It On) Dushku as best friend Annabel. Other cast members include Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Luke Wilson and Angela Featherstone. This is definitly a horror film you can watch over and over again and find something new, and it will always entertain you!

Overall: A great horror film with a purely shocking climax!

Grade: A+

This movie was confusing to say the least.

... and I'm not talking about the odd path of the dream-like, mysterious, what's going on storyline. I'm talking about the fact that it wasn't better than it was??

The movie had a lot of things going for it. It was very well shot. Cool images. A frightening opening scene that started to flesh out as the cast of characters attended a very dark and mysterious dance club. A club where, the audience knows they shouldn't be there, but the characters don't.

The cast was excellent. Melissa Sagemiller, Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck, Eliza Dushku and very creep Angela Featherstone, all performed well.

Yet, all of a sudden, the movie jumped into this dreamlike state, forgetting the story they had started, and took us in a direction that, well...

I'm confused. I don't know if it was supposed to be surprising? If it was supposed to leave me guessing? It didn't. I knew exactly what was going on. The first part of the movie was intriguing. But, quite frankly, The second part of the movie was an absolute yawner.

In baseball terms, SOUL SURVIVORS was a foul ball. A LONG foul ball, but a fall ball all in the same.

So up until I saw this movie I thought Valentine was the absolute lowest modern teen-horror movies could sink. Then I saw Soul Survivors. It isn't as hackneyed and generic as Valentine, but it is really, really boring. I had trouble telling the two male leads apart, they both had exactly the same haircut, and no distinguishing features. The plot just went nowhere. After the hints that something sinister is going on start presenting themselves, the plot goes nowhere. There is no progression towards figuring out what is going on and reaching a conclusion, the plot just stagnates, with numerous sinister occurances that are never explained. Even at the end of the film, we get no closure. The question of whether the people pursuing the girl were real flesh and blood people, paranormal manifestations, or merely her own personal delusions, is never answered. That just adds to the weakness of the film though. Even if there was a conclusion, it would still be unwatchably dull.

Is she dead? Or isn't she? Did anything in the movie really happen, or didn't it? Who knows? The real question is, how in the hell did I sit through 83 minutes of this junk? Who knows? Boredom? If only I always I had that much time on my hands.

Cassie(Melissa Sagemiller) is about to leave for college, but not before spending one last night partying with her boyfriend Casey Affleck(Ben's brother), her ex-boyfriend Wes Bentley(American Beauty, The Four Feathers), and her best friend Eliza Dushku(Bring It On, The New Guy). The party goes bad when first, the new boyfriend catches Cassie kissing the ex-boyfriend(how soap opera!) and then they all get into a nasty car wreck. Cut to a few months later, Cassie's in college, her boyfriend is supposedly dead, and things basically degenerate into one big incoherent mess of a movie. Let's see, there are creepy guys chasing Cassie around the college, Eliza Dushku is having sex with Angela Featherstone for no apparent reason, the dead boyfriend keeps showing up, there are flashes of an operation, and Cassie meets a young priest(Owen... no wait, Luke Wilson) who seems to know a lot more about what's happening than he's letting on. That's the movie!

Throw in some Twilight Zone, a little Jacob's Ladder, and a dash of David Lynch, and you get a movie that's not as good as any of those three things. In fact, this movie [is bad]. While someone like Lynch throws in weird images and disjointed logic for a specific reason, this movie is basically weird for weird's sake. The acting was pretty decent, considering what they had to work with. Eliza Dushku, in particular, is a young actress with real potential. She is much better than most of the flicks she's been in, and here again, she's the best part of a bad movie. Wes Bently, another good one, stick with American Beauty, son.

In the end, I think that instead of being a Jacob's Ladder or Mulholland Drive, Soul Survivors is gonna go down with Blair Witch 2 as a wanna be mind bender that didn't quite work.

i never saw this movie at the theatres, but at 85 minutes, the additional material must not of amounted to much. and it sure doesn't. i like eliza dushku and bought the movie for that reason alone. the plot is muddled, acting fair, and not well-paced. the box advertises: more blood! more sex! more terror! well, there is very little of any of those. there are a lot of extras, but i don't know why someone would want 3 different motion menus. borrow or rent it before you buy. a subpar teen movie that is not worth the price. and if ya don't believe me, look at how many are for sale, used, and how cheap they are.

This was not a typical teen slasher movie as I was expecting it to be, but it wasn't very satisfying either. It seemed too familiar and too similar to a much better psychological thriller that came out about 10 years ago, called Jacob's Ladder, where the main character struggles with figuring out the difference between reality and fantasy.

The young cast is nice to look at, with Wes Bentley giving a credible performance, and Eliza Dushku acting a bit like her Buffy the Vampire Slayer character, Faith, here. New girl Melissa Sagemiller, who reminds me a bit of Claire Danes, did a good job as the lead character, but I found the performances of Casey Affleck and Luke Wilson to be very wooden and unemotional.

I was probably disappointed with the movie because I figured it out pretty early, and because it was so similar to Jacob's Ladder. I was also disappointed by the lack of tension throughout the story. For a scary thriller, the movie tended to relax too much inbetween the scary and tense moments, and when the scary moments did come, they weren't a surprise at all.

As for the DVD itself, it's got quite a few extras, and it's one of the few DVDs not created by Fox Studios that has alternate menu layouts to choose from, like Fox has done with the Phantom Menace, Bedazzled, and Me, Myself, and Irene.

One disappointment with the extras was that the behind-the-scenes featurette was only 4 minutes long, while there was a 10-minute interview with one of the bands on the movie's soundtrack. I would've prefered having more time go to the behind-the-scenes of the movie instead.

I'm glad I only rented this movie. I wouldn't buy it for my collection.