Originally posted January 31, 2010:
Nobody's ever heard of this movie and that's just fine. It's one of those lame demonic possession movies that come out by the handful. "I'm a troubled kid who used to be possessed and/or my parents were Satanists. I just helped out on an exorcism and the demon said your body was going to be inhabited by Satan himself." "Oh, well, that can't be possible, right? I mean, I don't really know who my real father is... Oh, and I suppose I dreamed of 666 in Greek numbers and I just found a pentacle under my bed. Crap, how do we stop this?" "We can't really." "Oh, darn, I guess you'll have to try to kill me before the random appointed time that Satan fully takes over my body and you'll either succeed or not."
Not much more to say than that. It's a boilerplate story with no scares and no imagination, so it attemps to exorcise any anticipation out of you by screaming: "The power of Christ will bore the crap out of you! The power of Christ will bore the crap out of you!" In this case, Wynona Ryder plays the good guy in a frighteningly unenergetic performance. The thing that really jumps out is how brutally over-directed the movie is. It's one of three films ever directed by Janusz Kaminski, who is much more famous for having been Stephen Spielberg's Director of Photography since Schindler's List, winning Oscars for Cinematography in that movie and Saving Private Ryan. In Lost Souls, Kaminski shoots everything from weird angles with strange hues and way too many shadows. It's actually pretty interesting, after having seen the movie, to read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (which I always do for these movies) and see how many critics talk about how beautifully-shot this was. Not all of them do, though, and it's the others that I respect. A forty-five-degree turn of the camera while shooting straight dialogue does not a respectable art film make. The film is quite mediocre, befitting its ranking near the bottom of the list. My one joy about it is that, since it is about Christ and the Anti-Christ, us Jews don't have much to do with anything in the plot. All Catholics. Mel Gibson may have gone after us in The Passion but, sorry, guys, I'm putting this one on you.
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