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+


Not as bad as everyone is making it out to be...   January 24, 2006
 14 out of 15 found this review helpful

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.


Preposterous.   March 1, 2002
 9 out of 15 found this review helpful

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.