The Soultangler

"The Soultangler" is a very low budget film with an intriguing premise that takes a while to get where it is going but pays off spectacularly in the end. Dr. Anton Lupesky invents Anphiorum, a drug that allows the user's soul to leave their body and inhabit any corpse that still has eyes (yes being the window to the soul after all). The side effect is horrible, maddening hallucinations that kill most of the drug's users.

Though the beginning is slow going as to be expected from a lot of trash horror films of this era, the story builds nicely and has a fantastically gore-soaked climax that makes the previous 70 minutes entirely worth it. Every ounce of the tiny budget is on screen and though the actors might not be professionals and the camera-work is shaky, there is a passion and a heart to this film that movies will hundred million dollar budgets cannot match.

If you don't go in expecting constant action or thrills and accept that this is a micro-budget film determined to tell a surreal, dream-like story of science gone horribly wrong, you will enjoy it. Trust me though, stick with it till the ending and you will love this film.

Soultangler (1987)

* (out of 4)

Anton Lupesky is a scientist who of course turns out to be mad. He creates a drug that will allow the users spirit to leave their body and posses corpses but of course there's a major side effect.

SOULTANGLER is a film that I had never heard of before it came out onto DVD. I must admit that I had never heard a thing about it and after watching it I'm even more confused because there's really not too much here. I mean, was the company releasing this trying to pass it off as a cult movie? Perhaps as a movie that's so bad it's good? I'm really not sure what they were trying to do but it seems the filmmakers were going for something like RE-ANIMATOR but they didn't have a budget.

For me the worst thing about this picture is that it just couldn't keep me entertained or glued into what was going on. Every once in a while we'd get some bloody deaths but there's not nearly enough to keep you entertained. As you'd expect the performances are pretty bad but this here can be forgiven. The film also features some pretty weak special effects but I will say that I enjoyed them for what they were. At least they tried to give us some practical effects with gore.

I guess there might be some people who get some laughs out of the picture but it just didn't work for me. SOULTANGLER just didn't grab me or hold my attention.

A crazy scientist called Anton Lupesky develops a drug called Anphorium, which makes the soul leaves the body and enters in any corpse with eyes. It affects the nerve center, causing madness as side effect.

I was able to watch exactly fifteen minutes of this crap. This thing is so awful that I was tempt to watch more, to see how far is the mental incapability of this moron amateurish Pat Bishow. I do not know who the worst is: this director, the writer or the producer, maybe all of them together. These guys deserved to be sued for such a horrible crap. It certainly is the worst flick I have ever tried to see. I borrowed this VHS from my friend Ricardo, and I advise him: get rid off this garbage, do not waste your time on this trash. My vote is zero (one in IMDb lowest rating).

Title (Brazil): "O Embrulhador de Almas" ("The Soul Wrapper")

This movie has it all. "Carrll!" People talking. People smoking. People smoking in wood paneled rooms. People's lips moving but no sound comes out. People's lips moving but they only sigh. A girl lights up three times during a 1 minute conversation due to bad editing. Overflowing ashtrays. A guy gets hit head-on by a van he was running behind. Maybe. Self-mutilation. Nightmares. A woman whines "Carrrlll" until I stop and look up Llamas with Hats on YouTube. Faces spraying blood into other faces.

The 1980s gave us some legendary low-budget independent horror movies that proved that talent and imagination are far more important than a big budget: The Evil Dead, Basket Case and The Deadly Spawn, to name a few. At the other end of the spectrum, we have The Soultangler, a rambling, disjointed, incoherent mess of a movie.

The story has something to do with a mad scientist, Dr. Anton Lupesky (Pierre Devaux), who is experimenting with soul transferrence, but trying to keep track of the plot is virtually impossible thanks to miserable writing, amateurish direction and slapdash editing. Oh, and the acting stinks as well.

Towards the end of the film, we are treated to some fun, splattery, cheapo gore effects - a crawling brain with eyeballs, a gruesome talking corpse, a severed head - and for this reason I rate this garbage a 2/10 rather than the 1/10 that it most probably deserves.