Hunting Souls

I watched this on a streaming platform nearly a week ago. Very eerie as horror movies should be. The acting was good enough by aal but the lady from social services. But it seemed to be pre-edit copy, meant to be viewed by the producers for editing suggestions. The couple, although played very well by these well-seasoned actors, seemed to had multi-personalities. And, like so many horror, sci-fi & thriller movies, the couple doesn't communicate, but these people took that to extreme, not sharing with each other even after witnessing the spookiest experiences & sightings, things that real people would evacuate the premises, at least for the night for. I feel sorry for the little girls who play Sophie, this being the debut for one of them, who performed their scenes as their role demanded. I sincerely hope the copy I saw was a rough draft, & the final story was evened out.

The 2022 horror movie "Hunting Souls" from writer and director Diego Silva Acevedo was a movie that I hadn't heard about prior to getting to sit down and watch it. I must admit that I was drawn in by the movie's cover/poster art, and the fact that it was a horror movie that I hadn't already seen.

While "Hunting Souls" was watchable, it was also a movie that was lingering on the threshold of being an ultimately bad low budget horror movie. I mean, the concept idea here was adequate, although very, very generic. And Diego Silva Acevedo was essentially playing on every stereotypical trope that these demonic stalking movies tend to share. But hey, at least you know what you are getting here.

The acting performances in "Hunting Souls" were for the most parts of the movie fair enough. However, here and there throughout the course of the movie there acting performances and dialogue so cringeworthy that you just stop dead in your track and shake your head in disbelief. These moments were horrible and sort of made the movie feel somewhat of a rollercoaster ride.

Now, I wasn't familiar with the cast in the movie, and that is something I tend to enjoy when I sit down to watch movies. And it was adequate enough in "Hunting Souls", despite the fact that some of the dialogue and performances were perplexingly horrible to bear witness to.

Visually then "Hunting Souls" was adequate. I mean, the demonic entity was low budget for sure. I mean, you have a guy dressed up in a latex body suit that is made slick with some kind of lubricant. Yeah, that just doesn't scream creature from the depths of Hell.

For a horror movie then "Hunting Souls" was pretty straight forward. It was generic and pretty much followed the how-to-make-a-demonic-stalking-movie blueprint to the letter. It wasn't a scary movie, not even in the least bit. Then there was the ending of the movie. While I will not spoil anything here, I just have to say that the ending was pretty bad.

My rating of "Hunting Souls" lands on a four out of ten stars. There are far better movies of a similar type out there, so this movie is not something I would recommend you rush out to get your hands on.

Okay story but the acting and the dialogue was cringe and weird multiple times. There's some weird interactions happening, like when they enter the hospital the dad is yelling for a doctor (which makes sense seeing as his child is unresponsive) and the nurse is offended by that; "you don't need to yell... we always take care of her." Then later the doctor and nurse are discussing a previous similar case to that of the child, and the nurse says "well they were best friends." How does she know?? They're 7 year olds, how would she know who their best friends are? Also, of course the first and only person to die in this movie was the one POC in it...

Lastly, the true horror in this movie is corporate America: Mike's boss not caring that he is taking many days off because his daughter is sick and making him choose between his job and his family.

The evil entity was slimy enough and looked rather similar to many other actually scary monsters. The young child was the best actor of the bunch. (Great under water scene, which is why I gave it a two. Not a spoiler.) Child also showed superior intelligence at 1 hour 23 minutes. I don't know who she inherited her brain from, certainly not the parents. Maybe she was adopted. This could be a sort of spoiler: A ROPE, what? I have seen a few thousand horror movies in my almost 77 years, fan since I was allowed to see my first one when I was 10 and that was a first, you will know what I mean, if you make it that far. As expected in a horror movie, plenty of dead people, mostly due to stupidity. I watched the whole thing so I could review it fairly.

This film follows the standard plot pattern of a possesssed house or person with the target family initially disbelievers. The movie has a subplot with another family having just experienced the same "symptoms." But about all we can glean is that the child died and the father has a heart attack (could it related to the other mysterious going's-on?) The police and social workers add a new thread, but like the first family, there's no further development. Like the genre's standard plot, a family friend suggests they talk to an uncredentialed dream interpretation therapist. When the family hears what she has to say, which w compasses much more than dreams, the bumpy and fast moving conclusion begins. And about 10 minutes later we're looking at credits.