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Soul Survivors (The Killer Cut)

Soul Survivors (The Killer Cut)

List Price: $9.98
Your Price: $9.98
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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Alright, but Not That Good
Review: This movie was okay. Not very good acting, not a very good script and not very scary. I liked the twist at the end. That was the only thing creative about the movie. The movie just seemed very lacking.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Garbage!!
Review: This was the worse movie I have ever seen. I was very disappointed. I had no idea what this movie was about until the very end. When I say the end, I mean the very last scene of the movie. I can't believe it was all a dream...or was it. I have no idea.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A Dissapointment
Review: Soul Survivors, a film about a group of college bound friends who get in a wreck. One of them dies in the wreck, and the girlfriend of the deceased friend is now seeing him everywhere. She's also having reoccurring dreams of him, but experiencing things in real life. There's also a trio of mysterious individuals following and threatening her, and trying to take over the remaining two friends' lives.

Soul Survivors really could have been an enjoyable suspense thriller. The concept is very interesting. Even when they tried to lengthen it with a "Dream / Nightmare / Reality" concept, it still is interesting. This is why I bought the DVD before seeing the movie (Plus the fact that Eliza Dushku was in it). But the movie just doesn't live up to its interesting concept. There are many plot holes (What was with the opening murder scene? What exactly is the background of the 3 weird individuals?) and the ending is just one great big mind trip that has no rational explanation as it goes along. It was as if the director just filmed scenes which seemed to have tension and suspense and threw them together to see if we actually got the whole jist of it. Even in all of this, the cast was very strong and full of talented actors even if some of their characters and character development was very thin. Melissa Sagemiller, our lead, played the estranged girlfriend very well. She portrayed her character very well, with what she was given. I hope to see her in something else. Wes Bentley and Eliza Dushku's acting talents were shown here, and Casey Affleck was good.

Artisan does provide us DVD buyers with a very good disc. The video and audio are good, especially during the rave scenes in the movie. The "Killer Cut," which is the R-rated version of the movie, is on the disc as opposed to the theatrical PG-13 release. I never saw the PG-13 version, but I'm pretty sure I can pick out the stuff that wasn't on it. There are 3 deleted scenes. The first 2 do not really do much of anything for the movie, while the third deleted scene actually helped me understand the movie better and should have been kept in. There's also a fluffy featurette, scene-select audio commentary with Melissa Sagemiller, and theatrical trailers to Soul Survivors and 5 other Artisan titles. There's also an unneeded, not funny spoof docu on the band Harvey Danger, which contributed one song to the movie.

I really do wish Soul Survivors could have been edited differently with more background on the story because it could have been really good, but I'll have to settle for a very mildly entertaining movie.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Preposterous.
Review: Soul Survivors makes no sense. The central concept was an intriguing one, but you don't get it from the movie -- you get it from hearing the actors talk about it. The movie is just a series of unexciting stalk-and-slash hallucinatory sequences that become tiring the second time they appear...and then the movie proceeds to give you ten more.

How did top-calibre actors Wes Bentley and Eliza Dushku find themselves in this mess? It is testament to their talent that neither of them embarrasses him/herself despite the absolute mess that is the script. Bentley (Matt) lets his repressed attractions to Cassie (Melissa Sagemiller) simmer through, while Dushku dances about the screen in her relatively insignificant scenes, managing to make a cardboard-cutout bad girl interesting.

Sagemiller is overshadowed by Bentley and Dushku not because she's a bad actress, but because the story doesn't let her show any complexity at all. Cassie is a victim character through and through. For 75% of this movie she's crying and wimpering -- perhaps writer/director Steve Carpenter finds that great acting. But after Cassie experiences her fourth dream sequence, it's just boring as hell. Luke Wilson is colourless and flat, the usually interesting Angela Featherstone stumbles (stuck with a botched character), but Casey Affleck (Sean) is worse than all of them. He's laughable. The "love" between Sean and Cassie is about as kitsch and shallow as they come, and the idea that the whole plot hinges on it just cracks me up. As it was, I found myself chuckling through most of this movie when I'm supposed to feel empathy, catharsis, or horror.

This movie does resemble Jacob's Ladder in certain cosmetic ways. But if you thought Jacob's Ladder was a stretch of logic, Soul Survivors will have you seeing stars. Plot points are raised and then abandoned (or forgotten -- the stamp at the club, the initial attack on the mystery girl, the priest, the "lesbian" subplot, and the "death masks" all seem to disappear in a wisp of plot confusions), and when at the end of the movie you don't even know who's dead or alive, you know you have a problem. (Even Sagemiller in her commentary track quips: "At the end...hopefully...the audience will get it") Oodles of bad music perpetrate scenes, trying to manipulate the audience into feeling something the scenes fail to convey. Need I go on?

I can only imagine how much worse the PG-13 version of this film probably is, when even the violence and perverse sexuality are toned down to make this dull, fragmented attempt at a movie even duller and more fragmented. Soul Survivors is even worse than Urban Legend, and that's a hell of a dilemma for a self-professed thriller to be in.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Worse than I expected
Review: I wasn't really expecting this movie to be good, but I thought it would be somewhat entertaining. I was wrong. I'm not sure why I finished watching it, especially when I found out how [dumb] the ending is. There is not really much to tell about the non-existent plot, it took about 30 minutes for anything much to even happen. The opening scene has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Most of the time I was wondering why Wes Bentley, Luke Wilson and Casey Affleck were even in this. The DVD does have some features, a few deleted scenes. One of the deleted looks like it might be an alternate ending, which is somewhat of an improvement over what ended up in the actual movie. There are some animated storyboards and some selected scene commentary from Melissa Sagemiller, who played the main character Cassie. Even with the features I can't say this movie is worth watching.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: CARNIVAL OF SOUL SURVIVORS
Review: Gee, is it just me or is this movie just CARNIVAL OF SOULS with a catholic guilt syndrome thrown in? Add a priest that's a ghost and you've got SOUL SURVIORS. I saw this in a theater with just myself and no absolutely no one else was in the theater on a SATURDAY no less. I don't understand why there are so many CATHOLIC GUILT horror films that mix religious faith with horror. Stuff like STIGMATA, and BLESS THE CHILD. Who writes these bogus horror movies? People who are trying to sneak catholic doctrine into horror movies? Most irritating trend ever if you ask me. Why can't horror films just be horror, like JEEPERS CREEPERS. I don't care about family unity or wether or not some wretched girl wakes up from a car accident. I want blood and gore and to be scared. Please feel free not preach at me!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Psychological Thriller
Review: First of all, I would like to say that I have the original R-rated version of Soul Survivors on DVD and it makes much more sense than the theatrical version. So if you are having trouble with the editing, check out that version and it will probably be cleared up. I am a psych major at college, so maybe I get into this kind of movie more than others, but I loved this movie. It is about four friends who are involved in a terrible car crash. The movie revolves around Cassie, who tries to come to terms with
being the one driving during the crash. She feels survivor guilt and she tries to figure out what really happened following the accident. I thought this movie was very clever and I feel that it did not get the recognition it deserved due to delays in release dates. I also thought the movie had a fantastic ending. I was pretty confused during the entire movie, but it was all cleared up in the end. It is definetly a movie that gets better the more you watch it.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: disappointing movie, cool DVD
Review: 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.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: More Sophisticated Than Your Average Teen Slasher!
Review: WHERE TO BEGIN...The story centres around our heroine Cassie [Melissa Sagemiller] leaving for collage with her friend Annabel [Eliza Dushku],her ex-boyfriend [Wes Bentley] and her current squeeze Sean [Casey Affleck]. On their last night of freedom, they decide to go to a gothic rave [WHO KNOWS WHY!] when Cassies ex explains they should have one last kiss. Sean witnesses this and argues with Cassie in the car. Her attention leaves the road and the car topples over into the bushes. They all survive except for Sean who is dearly missed by Cassie. Life goes on for the trio yet Cassie is being stalked by a masked man. She seeks refuge in Father Jude [Luke Wilson]'s church yet learns the horrifying truth about her two friends who try to take her over to the dark side...

HERE WE GO...This movie tanked at the box office as it had been delayed numerous times.The script is laughable and it has one of the worst on-screen nose bleeds in cinema history but dont let that put you off.Wes Bentley shows the promise that he had in American Beauty and Casey Affleck steps out of his brother Ben's shadow. Melissa Sagemiller's acting is laughable yet Eliza compensates by acting her off the screen. This makes for great friday night entertainment yet you WILL need your brain cells for the ending.

4 out of 5

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Awesome movie
Review: I wasnt that psyched when my friends decided to see this movie b/c i heard it was horrible but WOW. it was so awesome and it kept you guessing the whole time. i gave it a thumbs up because it made me cry a little and nothing does that lol. anyways a definite must have its so awesome i was just a little upset that it didnt get rave reviews. . . so suspenseful and scary :)


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