Hunting Souls

Do you know those English language video lessons sketches? That people dub Oblivion music over? That's the level of acting in this movie. The main actor especially, speaks like a text-to-speech program and shows the same range of emotion.

The script and dialogue seems alright at first, but the cast has no chemistry at all. Then things take a nosedive - dialogue goes from weird to just disjointed in relation to what is happening - for example one hour into the movie they still deny anything supernatural.

The scares are the tired old loud noises and doors banging stuff. All the sets and props - house, office, hospital, outside shots - they looks so sterile, as if you are watching a commercial and not a real living and breathing world captured on camera.

The demon is just a copy-paste Creature of the Black Lagoon or Stranger Things season 4 type of deal. Of course done way,way cheaper and goofy looking. A demon from "Wish" as the kids say.

Overall a bad movie with no redeeming qualities. Can't kill time with it, can't enjoy it in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way either. Stay away no matter how desperate you think you are for a supernatural horror flick.

Terrible acting by all. The monster did the best acting ffs. Anyone who gave this a good review must have been paid, family member, was their first movie or they have an IQ of 54 or less. Daddy's boss did the acting.

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.

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.