Written and Directed by Wes Craven, My Soul to Take attempts to meld two of the director’s previous successes, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, into a new and clever film exploiting multiple personality disorder for its mythology. The film falls very short of this goal and ends up being a jumbled mess of nonsense that offers up no real scares, a limp mystery, massively uneven performances and some of the most worthless 3D I have ever seen.

The story is a complete mess and I think that there must have been copious cuts made to various connective scenes to make them make sense but what we have is a meandering narrative that touches on several different concepts that could have been interesting if they had actually gone some where but were just left dangling. I think Craven had some good ideas but tried to do too much and failed to match it all up properly.

The story here involves a serial killer who is finally caught after he kills his pregnant wife and several police officers and who has seven personalities. One of these personalities is a murderer and has been doing the killings around town. He takes several bullets and an ambulance accident to kill although his body disappears and it is thought it fell in to the river. The night of his death seven babies are born and a myth sprouts up that each of the babies carry one of the killer’s personalities. Flash forward 16 years later where the way these kids celebrate their birthdays is to beat back a puppet of the Ripper to ensure that he doesn’t come back and kill everyone. This year, it is Bug’s (Max Thieriot) turn to beat back the puppet and he fails because the police crash the party. Then all hell breaks loose when the seven kids start getting murdered one by one while Bug has strange visions and seems to be having some kind of psychotic break as he starts acting like the other kids.

There is more in there than that but those are the broad strokes. The mystery element of the whole thing takes up a large amount of screen time but it is pretty obvious early one who is behind everything despite the misdirects that Craven throws at you. Part of the reason for this is that the misdirects are so reminiscent of Scream that if you are at all familiar with Craven’s films in general and that one in particular you will have no problem honing right in on who the killer is. Craven throws a lot of things at you but he can’t misdirect you away from the obvious.

Craven tries to tie Multiple Personality Disorder to the supernatural with the premise that sometimes the personalities aren’t personalities but demons hiding in plain sight. I am not usually bothered by these sorts of contrivances but when it is a disorder/syndrome that manifests because something so bad has happened to the person that one personality can’t bear to deal with the memory and creates several others to take pieces of the burden then it seems a bit crass to exploit it for something so frivolous as a horror movie. Maybe if something worthwhile had been said about it then things would be different but the way it was handled here made me uncomfortable. That it was referred to as Schizophrenia makes it that much worse. Schizophrenia is not the same disorder at all and while pop psychology fails to recognize this more often than not, I would have hoped someone of Craven’s stature would have done some research.

There is some additional mythology about the California Condor and the belief that it eats the souls of the dead and it all kind of ties together in the loosest of ways but by the time it comes together you have seen so much random nonsense that it doesn’t really matter. There is just so much here that doesn’t add up to anything. You have Bug’s sister running around like some kind of half-baked Godfather who runs the school, you have a religious nut who seems to be having holy visions, a sort of half-baked relationship between the detective who was there the night the Ripper died and a paramedic who almost died that night and so on. Just a lot of disparate things that don’t end up amounting to much. It feels kind of like Craven knew his story was weak so he tried to pile a bunch of shit on top of it so maybe the audience wouldn’t notice. It is hard not to notice. If this movie were a reality TV show it would be Hoarders.

The performances were crazy. Some people are alright but most are way over the top and ridiculous. Bug’s sister in particular is really, really bad at times and vaguely passable at others. The lack of quality here, and it really feels like the direction is what is going wrong, makes me think that maybe Craven was doing pre-production on Scream 4 and just let the second-second direct the majority of this thing. I honestly hope that is it.

The 3D here is probably the biggest waste I have ever seen. It isn’t so much that the 3D is bad it is just pointless. Most of the time you barely notice that it is in 3D at all and it was clearly not shot with the effect in mind. As frustrating as it is to see a movie with shitty post-conversion 3D, it is that much more annoying to be chiseled for the extra money when the 3D adds absolutely nothing at all to the film. That there was no 2D option made this sting that much more. The list of arguments against 3D keeps growing and we pretty much only have Avatar in the pro column. Things aren’t looking good for the medium.

Conclusion [4.5 out of 10]

Wes Craven was looking to put a new fresh twist on the supernatural slasher picture but only managed to deliver a rehashed mishmash of other, much better horror movies. Craven should really know better at this point and this film is a sad blemish on his record. I really like Craven a lot and it makes me sad that I disliked this so much but hopefully he will be back to form in Scream 4.