Soul Survivors

If you're like me, you probably caught the trailer for Soul Survivors almost a year ago when it first (and only) popped up in theatre preview reels. Shot roughly two years back, Steve Carpenter's teen-lite riff on Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has sat gathering dust on the shelf since then, a victim of both the MPAA's ratings guidelines as well as (presumably), interference from real-life news such as Columbine et al. Dead teens, even supernatural ones, haven't been playing well in Peoria. Trimmed from its original R rating to a considerably tamer PG-13, the film, as it stands, is a toothless, fright-free journey into dullsville, making even the admittedly overhyped Final Destination -- with which it shares a fair amount of metaphysical gibberish -- seem like a sudden classic of the genre. It's not just unfrightening, it's downright boring -- the cardinal sin for the suspense/horror amalgam it tries to be. Carpenter, who more recently penned the script for Steven Soderbergh's upcoming Ocean's 11, as well as the well-regarded 1986 shrieker The Kindred (which he also directed) seems completely hamstrung here, taking a perfectly serviceable idea -- a girl and her friends suffer a terrible car accident which leaves the girl's boyfriend dead, or is he?! -- and running smack dab into the wall o' shame with it. As Cassie O' Neil, Sagemiller is called upon to react to the mysterious doings post-accident, which include both subtle (nosebleeds!) and not-so-subtle (mysterious strangers pursuing her!) surrealist touches meant to instill a sense of quiet unease in both her and the audience. Dead heartbreaker Sean (Affleck) keeps reappearing to Cassie in dreams, then in reality, while her ex-boyfriend Matt (Bentley, slumming in the wake of American Beauty but no less interesting to watch) hangs around sporting a lot of black and burning holes in the frame with that “I'm eating your soul,” 1,500-watt stare of his. Meanwhile, poor Luke Wilson's tender priest Jude wanders through the film like an escapee from Dr. Caligari's Rectory. Carpenter clearly wants to emulate the slippery dream logic of older, better films such as Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder and the aforementioned Bierce tale (which was eventually adapted for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, by the way), but he can't keep his relativistic footing on that slippery slope and ends up with a film that slides inexorably from “What the fuck?' to plain old “Fuck that!”