Dead and tired

>> Soul Survivors makes the creepy banal

by MARK SLUTSKY

Soul Survivors is the latest youth-oriented horror flick from Neal H. Moritz and Stokely Chaffin, the producing team who brought moviegoers I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend. Moritz and Chaffin have done themselves one better with Soul Survivors: while their previous thriller pics were all middling style and no substance, this one's got a whole lot of neither. Lacking both form and content, Soul Survivors can hardly be called a movie at all. Hell, it can hardly be called anything at all.

Say one thing, though--the producers mysteriously managed to round up a pretty decent cast for their exercise in nothingness, with up-and-comers Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck, Luke Wilson, Eliza Dushku and Melissa Sagemiller all appearing. Sagemiller plays Cassie, a young woman heading off to university. Boyfriend Affleck and buds Bentley and Dushku drive her to school to help her get settled in (it seems that maybe Dushku, and possibly Bentley, attend there as well, but pretty much all of the plot details in Soul Survivors are muddled and uncertain). That night they all go to a crazy nightclub, one of those only-in-the-movies clubs housed in an enormous abandoned cathedral "just outside of town." Our heroes get into a terrible car wreck on the way back and survivor Sagemiller must deal with a dead boyfriend, ghosts, a saintly young priest (Wilson), and a lot of screaming and running around.

Writer/director Steve Carpenter seems to think that a dreamlike narrative excuses all sorts of confusion. Take the lesbian relationship between Dushku and Angela Featherstone. Carpenter seems to have not made up his mind as to whether this is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing--at times Featherstone seems to be dragging Dushku down to hell, at other times she appears as some kind of saviour figure. And this is the least of the movie's weaknesses--we're dealing with a director here who really thinks a pair of blood-spattered Keds is arresting enough an image to repeat four or five times. Eventually--about 20 minutes in--the canny moviegoer will realize that Soul Survivors is just a senseless, poorly thought out rip-off of Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder and possibly Phillip K. Dick's novel Ubik. At least it's only 85 minutes long.

Soul Survivors opens Friday, Sept. 7