Film Review: 4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker (2012)

SYNOPSIS:

Four girls move into their first off-campus house only to find that the owner is a soul-eater who needs to consume their souls in order to survive.

REVIEW:

The contentious relationship between myself and the head honcho at Horrornews.net is only growing uglier because of his insistence in demanding that I sit through & review movies like 4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker (previously known as The Rental). If he thinks the Black Saint is just gonna sit back and allow this perverse form of punishment to continue he’s got another thing coming! But before I smite him down with a fury unfettered…I do have to fulfill my obligations to him and watch some more craptacular films, films like this one….

The plot isn’t anything to write home about. Four college students rent a 3 bedroom apartment at an outrageously low price that’s conveniently located just off campus. Bianca (Tiffany S. Walker) is the loose one, Lori (Ashley Love) & Pam (Leah Verrill) are lovers and Bianca’s younger sister Lily (Katherine Browning) is the goody gum drop of the quartet.

The four of them fit right into every stereotype you’re imagining right now but the extremely pedestrian script (By co-directors Mike Campbell & Todd Johnson) wasn’t written to give any of them any depth anyway. Their landlord, Devlin Chito (Co-director/screenwriter Campbell) should’ve been the first hint that something was fishy in the first place because not only does he look like the love child of Roger Corman and James Remar, he carries the air of a child molester about him. He has a silly, whiny voice and when he makes his first appearance as the Naluso Chito (The titular Soul Taker) he wears a silly looking grim reaper costume and some cheap dime store makeup that in combination with that voice makes him the most non threatening bad dude in any film I’ve seen this year. If the girls had any sense they would’ve just beat the living crap out of him as soon as he arrived on the scene.

The Soul Eater actually does take souls but they have to be the souls of bad people…the souls of good people just make him physically ill (Like Udo Kier in Warhol’s Dracula when he drank the blood of girls who weren’t “Wirgins”). Luckily for him, he’s gone and rented his joint to 2 lesbians & a whore. Not that I’m implying that there’s anything bad about that, I found it mildly interesting that the script takes pains to point out that lesbianism & sexual freedom are apparently bad things. For a second I thought that maybe there was some christian group that might have been responsible for this mess but then I got some super soft core lesbian sex scenes tossed into the mix so I guess that negated that theory.

So for the duration of the film’s running time I got 4 scantily clad actresses who can’t act being chased around by an extremely fey villain wearing a hood who watches them on an iPad draped in a piece of canvas from his apartment to make him look all scary & stuff. Every so often he comes to the apartment and gets one of the girls to either kill herself or get murdered by one of the others (Which also made them bad in his eyes. So he could take their souls too).

The one mildly decent bit in the film is the actual process of soul taking which involves both parties opening their mouths wide and having some yellow mist float from one mouth to the other. It’s just a cheap optical but still effective when used properly. Other than that there’s a bit of non-descript bloodshed & an ice pick thrust into someone’s eye. None of this is exciting or scary in the least.

Of course, it all ends in a final showdown between goody-goody Lily & the fey, child molesting reaper wanna be and guess who wins that titanic tussle? On second thought, don’t bother to guess. It really doesn’t matter and the film’s final few scenes run far too long to make it’s dorky twist anything more than boring & expected. This is just an awful movie from start to finish and it doesn’t even have a loose breast or two to help keep its audience awake for more than a few minutes at a time. I was praying that someone would come along and snatch my soul up while I suffered through it just to end my misery but no dice…I sat through the whole thing.

I ought to win a medal for that. Maybe a new car or something…

4 Dead Girls – .5 out of 5 shrouds.