ORBzine Movie Reviews January 2002
Soul Survivors
Not another teen thriller, you cry.
However, this does not go down the familiar slasher route.
The girl who plays Alison in teen comedy Get Over It!
is in a car crash.
She is rescued and goes back to college,
but starts to have strange visions of her boyfriend [who died in the crash].
For all its posturing, this is not a psychological thriller like Don't Look Now or a supernatural thriller like Sixth Sense . No, the best comparison is with Jacob's Ladder . This is basically a light-weight, teenager-friendly version of that disjointed mess, with all the problems and none of the assets of the original film. For example, this is only about eighty minutes long, which gives little for developing any kind of plot. Let's face it, what plot there is just is n't worth developing.
However, there is at least one good thing about the film. Eliza Dushku doesn't play the stereotypical walking bad girl cliche that she does in every other film she'sever been in. No, here she plays a Goth chick, the protagonist's best friend.
Long Time Dead
A group of English 20-year-olds, along with token Yank Lukas Haas [
Space Camp
], play about on a ouiji board.
Unfortunately they summon a Djinn, a fire demon,
who knocks them off one by one.
They also have to deal with their loonie landlord Tom Bell.
Most of the film is psychological suspense, undermined by the fact that the characters are so unbelievably stupid that they deserve to die. In the current post- Scream era, they decide to split up and let the killer wipe them out one by one!
This is more or less a big-budget feature-length version of Urban Gothic. The only special effects, except for the ominous background noise every time something scary is about to happen, are when the Djinn is revealed at the climax of the film.