Soulkeeper

A sappy movie with a lot of monsters chasing people and menacing close-ups of reptilian creatures. Watch it if you're in the mood for a silly horror flick and have no desire to think or make judgements about plot, acting, or script.

(2001) Soulkeeper COMEDY HORROR

Although, the actual VHS case has a cool 3D cover on it, it's still a mediocre effort which is reminiscent of "Highway to Hell" made in 1991 because of it's laid back approach on the horror genre. Straight-to-rental but contains some familiar scenes to other films like "The Mummy" movies with Brendon Fraser and "From Dusk Til' Dawn". Written and directed by Darin Ferriola starring Rodney Rowland as Corey and Kevin Patrick Walls as Terrence, lightweight and sometimes clumsy thieves who're working together. They've just stolen a hat from some small museum that was supposed to be worn by Abe Lincoln and made some money out of it. They're then somehow get hired by a person who calls himself Mr. Pascal played by Brad Dourif, you know the guy who played Grima Wormtongue, the greasy snake guy from "The Lord Of The Ring" movies. Anyways, Mr. Pascal hires them to confiscate and steal some emblems as well as performing other tasks with reasons unbeknownst to viewers but has something to do with the reincarnation of a demon which has killed some ritualistic believers in the first few minutes, and also has the ability to possess other peoples human forms. Labelled as a light weight horror extravaganza which I think I only chuckled at least once throughout my entire experience since much of it is meandering. It has something do with the two stars entering what looked like the devil's brothel, unaware that the girls are really demons. I think the uncut TV version is slightly different than the VHS version for I'm not really sure since it was awhile ago since I had seen this.

This is a very entertaining film which I only discovered through the now essenjtial combination of eBay and the IMDB.

The two leads, who remind me of a young John Ritter and a young Patrick Swayze, are likeable. They master that difficult trick of showing spiritual development whilst being funny. Their confessions are delightful: "I once owned a copy of Judas Priest's Unleashed in the East".

There'a great cast of support players including Brad Dourif, Robert Davi and Karen Black.

The direction is very smart, with plenty of good tricks. I liked the snaring of the heroes in their first assault on Simon Magus's mansion.

Simon Magus! That's a nice piece of Christian lore to firm up the story's background.

The plotting is neat with some of the less understandable interludes made clear at the film's resolution which had a surprisingly wistful quality.

I rented this movie cause I heard it wasn't bad and I gotta tell ya, it wasn't bad... it was surprisingly good! Alright, so it is kinda low budget (although the special effects looked on par with most studio flicks) but the acting, direction, suspense, monsters were convincing and intriguing enough to keep me more entertained than most stuff in theaters. It's a silly movie, but if you like throwback flicks that combine horror and comedy (like Fright Night and Evil Dead) this is right up your alley.

Watch out for the German version of Soulkeeper, it's disastrous. Whatever is funny about the English version is lost, because they use only two actors for the dubbing - and they only use two because they need a male and a female speaker. The male speaker at least makes an effort to speak in different voices (though he only comes about with French accents of varying severity), but the female speaker says lines like "run for your lives" with all the urgency and emotion of a cafe waitress at 1am asking, "You want sugar with that?", and always sounds the same. I couldn't say much about the dialogue, since I didn't compare the two versions, but the speakers will give you a real bad case of nausea. Still, it's good enough if you want to watch a C film and don't mind the abominable voices.