Soultaker

This really isn't such a bad little movie. The basic story is quite interesting: five teenagers on their way home from a summer festival crash their car and awaken to find themselves unharmed. However, one of them is missing, and a mysterious man in black is stalking the rest of them down one by one and seemingly killing them. What the kids don't know, but soon come to realize, is that they are lost souls, thrown from their bodies at the moment of the accident. Their physical comatose selves are in the hospital, and the two remaining survivors have only a short time left to get back into their bodies before the Angel of Death comes to claim them.

A low budget, bad 80s music and an overly drawn out ending are the films only major flaws, but the acting is quite good and the story (written by star Vivian Schilling) is well thought out. Schilling went on to write a book entitled "Quietus" which is a sort-of sequel to this film.

Worth checking out at least once, with or without the MST3K commentary.

Okay, to be fair this movie did have an interesting concept. Given a few script rewrites, some decent actors and a budget, this might have been a fairly decent cult flick instead of the MST3K fodder it turned out to be.

Still, it was better than "Armageddon."

Soultaker is better than the average MST3K fodder. It is a B+ movie. A movie that has a pretty decent premise, but falls short on execution. Much like some of Roger Corman's work, it just misses being better than it's budget.

Let's start with the one positive and interesting concept of the movie: You aren't truly 'dead' until a soultaker / angel of death catches you.

That being said, here's the negative: 1)The Soultaker's are pretty much inept. They seemingly can't catch you even though you're dead. 2) They need to get right next to your "not alive but not quite dead" body in order to use their soul-sucking condom device. 3) The seemingly all powerful god-of-soultaker's just sits around while his lackey continually fails. 4) The lackey Soultaker even fails when disguised as the victims own mother?!?

These are just a small sample of problems with the script.... not even to mention the acting issues. However, I still must give credit to the young star/screenwriter Vivian, she did a better job here (in her early 20's at the time) than many "moviemakers" do their whole careers....

After seeing both the original version and the MST3K version, I can recommend both. The original version can be very much appreciated as an ambitious attempt by a young screenwriter to do something different. The MST3K version can be enjoyed simply as a movie with poor execution being rediculed...

OK, I saw this film through Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I did see the movie, so I figured I would leave a comment on it. I just love once again how Joe gets stuck with the crummy roles while his brother and nephew's are just getting the Oscar winning roles left and right. Soultaker is technically what you would call the movie that was meant to be good. It seemed like the director and actors just took this movie extremely seriously and had very cheesy effects, a story that didn't make much sense, and not to mention pretty crummy acting abilities. This is one of my favorite MST3K episodes, simple because a lot of what they mention is what we are thinking throughout the film and I'll explain why in a moment.

Natalie and Zach are a couple who broke up and are now trying to work things over. But since Zach is in upper lower class and Natalie is in middle class, it just ain't gonna work. But on the way home, they and Zach's friends get into a car accident and now the angel of death/Soultaker is after them to meet his quota of soultaking. But also it seems like he's had some kind of other life relationship with Natalie and just can't seem to move on. So now Natalie and Zach must race against the ever appearing five million times a minute clock to save their souls and lives.

Well, I guess Zeppelin was wrong when he sang that there was a stairway to Heaven, I wonder if Black Sabbith was wrong too, lol. Basically there are a lot of plot holes in this movies, like no one can see the characters and they can't be killed, yet somehow they can still press buttons and open doors? The Angel of Death had a very strange face and was a bit distracting from the story itself. Soultaker was just a lousy film that was rushed and makes you just feel so bad for Joe, the under-appreciated Sheen/Estovez brother.

2/10

In his book "I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie" Roger Ebert recalls a time when he and late partner Gene Siskel viewed a particularly bad clunker. To add insult to injury, the third reel of the film had gone missing and they had to return a few days later to see it. The elusive footage was just as bad as the rest, but as Siskel observed it wouldn't have helped the product any: "If the third reel had been the missing footage from 'The Magnificent Ambersons,' this movie still would have sucked."

I am, I will confess, one of those who has not seen the uncut version of "Soultaker" (having been unable to locate it on television or rental shelves and having other things I'd rather spend my money on). But I find it hard to believe that any amount of additional footage would vastly improve on what I've already seen.

To be fair this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the worst film to be the subject of a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episode--indeed, compared to such horrors as "Hobgoblins" and "The Wild World of Batwoman" it's downright marvellous. The storyline (an Angel-of-Death figure is assigned to collect the souls of some youngsters and ends up being obsessed with one of them) is promising--shades of Cocteau's "Orpheus"--and there are some nice moments of symbolism (the butterfly brooch was a nice touch). But overall the film falls short in several areas. To wit:

~The Soultaker--or "The Man" as he's billed--has the most potential of any character in the piece. Such parts are best when they come off as creepy or charasmatic, preferably both. Sadly Joe Estevez is neither, and in several scenes looks more confused than anything else.

~Vivian Shilling, who does double duty as screenwriter and as Natalie, the girl Estevez's character flips for. A writer casting themselves in their own work is not exactly a bad thing--take Mel Brooks, for example. But if I had been in Shilling's shoes, I would have written better dialogue for myself than "How is that possible?" and "I don't understand any of this."

~Zach, the would-be hero of this piece. Zach is the sort of protagonist who's so whiny and ineffective that you end up rooting for the bad guy--or you would be, if the bad guy wasn't played by Joe Estevez. We're told Zach loves Natalie, but it's a bit hard to swallow when his defense of his undying passion to a skeptical friend basically consists of "You don't know her!"

~The entire rich-kid/poor-kid thing between Zach and Natalie, which never really resonates other than as a reason to explain why these two nice young kids haven't got together yet.

~The bathroom scene. The fact that the Soultaker takes a female form to spy on the scantily-clad Natalie isn't so awful. The fact that the female form is that of Natalie's mother throws a very disturbing incestuous angle on the whole proceedings that it's just best to avoid examining it altogether.

Another time, another place, "Soultaker" could have been an excellent film. Sadly, that's not here and now.