Soulkeeper

For a low brow, low budget horror film this one is actually better than usual. Some of the jokes are actually amusing, the performers are lively and the special effects are actually quite good. Not all the bits are successful - but how can you go wrong with Karen Black as a fortune teller/psychic/manicurist who projectile vomits all over co-star Rowland while levitating during a 'seance'. The cast is rounded out by Robert Davi, Brad Dourif, Tiny Lister and Deborah Gibson appearing ever-so-briefly as herself!

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.

SOULKEEPER is about a pair of hapless thieves who accept a job from a Mr. Pascal (Brad Dourif), to steal a stone with magical properties.

It all sort of plays out like a mediocre episode of the old TALES FROM THE CRYPT from the early 1990's, full of blood, boobs, and the occasional laugh. The horror is humorous, and the humor is horrible. It seems pretty halfhearted as well.

MONSTER ALERT: If you're a monster fanatic and you want to see this movie because of the demon in the picture, then you'll want to know that it has about 4 seconds of screen time...

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.