Before his untimely death in 2015, director Wes Craven made his final directorial bow in 2011 with Scream 4 and while it certainly wasn’t the best in the franchise, there are far worse films he could have bowed out with. However, while rounding up his career with a fourth, meta-tastic offering of Ghostface may seem like a fitting finish to a career that recieved a boost thanks to the self aware slasher resurgence of the 90s, those who grew up with Craven’s more wilder, more allegory themed work of the 70s and 80s might have been feeling a little left out.
You see, before he started calling the shots with Munch-inspired masks, creepy phone calls and horror trivia, Craven’s output was loaded with ideas laced with morality, metaphysics and a long, hard stares into the nature of society itself. Echoing this was My Soul To Take – a return to the type of whacked-out plotting that gave us the Jungian terrors of A Nightmare On Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes – but was this underseen effort cut from the same red and green striped cloth, or was it more The Hills Have Eyes 2, if you know what I mean?
The town of Riverton has really been going through it. However, the climate of fear people are living under is soon due to lift when associative disorder sufferer Abel Plekov discovers that one of his personalities is the Riverton Ripper, a serial killer who has been terrorising the place. While this wouldn’t be great news as the best of times, matters are made even more complex that Abel dominant personality is a devoted family man with a pregnant wife and a young daughter who now are in mortal danger. In the chaos that follows, blood is spilt and the ambulance carrying the a wounded Ripper crashes, sending the maniac into the local river where he supposedly drowns.
However, sixteen years later we find that a curious local legend has risen up in the Ripper’s place. At the exact time the killer died at midnight all those years ago, seven babies were born and local lore suggests that the souls of the Ripper’s seven personalities found a home in each of the kids. Making up the group are the timid Adam “Bug” Hellerman, thuggish jock Brandon O’Neil, blind Jerome King, creative Jay Chan, devoutly religious Penelope Bryte, mean-girl-with-a-heart Brittany Cunningham and unpopular weirdo Alex Dunkelmam – but if the town legends are true, doesn’t that mean that one of the Ripperton 7 is the reincarnation of the killer?
Before you know it, someone is starting to line up the hapless seven for premature toe tags, but does this have anything to do with the traits of associative disorder that are manifesting within the troubled Bug? Has the Ripperton Ripper returned to rend and ravage, or is one of the seven unlucky enough to obtain the soul of a kill crazy butcher? Mindfuck time.
I have to say, as a Wes Craven fan, watching him get the chance to write his own stuff once more carries to same sort of bittersweet tinge to it that came with watching John Carpenter return after a long period of absence to direct The Ward – you’re glad they’re back in the saddle, but the result isn’t a great as the classic stuff. However, considering that this is the first time Craven was directing one of his own screenplays since 1994’s New Nightmare, you can hardly blame him for loading the movie full of ideas – it’s just a shame that they all tend to cancel each other out. This leaves the overriding and very strange feeling that My Soul To Take plays more like a Wes Craven rip-off than something the director would have turned in during his glory days. So, Wes Craven is ripping off Wes Craven, then – but is that really such a bad thing?
Well, when you take an objective look as Craven’s filmography, yes.
When operating at full capacity, there wasn’t many who could touch the director who crafted take-no-prisoners fright flicks that hit incredibly hard and yet managed to be thoughtful and cerebral while spreading the gore about. However, whenever he went wide of the mark, the man who birthed Freddy Krueger out of his brain pan could be responsible for some impressively dopey movies and thanks to some haphazard plotting and some genuinely strange dialogue choices (“If things get hot, turn on the prayer conditioning.” is a particularly memorable utterance) the slasher ends up more on the Deadly Friend end of the spectrum. In fact, the story of the Riverton 7 often feels so haphazard, who have to cling on real tight to the rather overlying story in order to make head or tail of it.
An opening sequence that sets the scene 16 years ago is so deliberately disjointed, it feels like someone’s tried to re-edit Wes Craven’s Shocker for the emo crowd as a troublingly young looking Frank Grillo and Danai Gurira try to piece things together after the vanquished killer springs back to life a cartoonish number of times. However, while things thankfully slow down after a 16 year time hop, the script keeps throwing us distracting curve balls and near incomprehensible info dumps. Why exactly Craven has the film quite so obsessed with the Californian condor I’ll never know and a lot of his teen angst is thwarted by the fact that it’s plainly been written by (an admittedly talented) 70 year-old man. Another issue is with the villain himself, which proves to be especially disappointing as Craven is a proven master at whipping up a good, nasty antagonist – but compared to Freddy, or Krug from Last House On The Left, or even Horace Pinker from Shocker, the Riverton Ripper looks like a cut price Rob Zombie Halloween costume who is buried under a metric ton of overly complex lore. Weirder yet, rather than driving home the soul-hopping metaphysics, the last act of the film suddenly becomes a Scream-lite whodunit where the surviving cast try to figure out who got the crappy soul and who didn’t.
Maybe with a tighter edit, we could gotten a bit more tension out of things, the cast (that includes suitably sullen performances from Max Thierot, Denzel Whitaker, Emily Meade and John Magaro) might have been a bit more endearing and we could have gotten a main villain that had snappier banter than just yelling stuff like “Fuck your fucking unborn child!” while getting handy with a knife.
While die hard fans of Craven will appreciate one last splurge of ideas from the great man before he dived into his final Scream, the sheer influx of concepts tend to make the mish-mash of classic Craven themes clumsily stumble over each other like Ghostface missing a ill-timed lunge. However, as time ticked away in the life of the beloved director, it’s kind of nice that he got to once again get some of his vision back on the screen once again – it’s just a shame there’s so bloody much of it.
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We Have Issues 
Craven was a hack.
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