My Soul to Take: Critic Reviews

Wes Craven's first new movie in five years is a brainless, joyless, and yes, you might even say, soulless teen slasher.

A thoroughly dreary, by-the-numbers exercise.

The worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever.

There's some malarkey about each kid having inherited one of the maniac's personalities, though Craven never does much with that except to point the finger of suspicion at junior.

This dumb, derivative teen slasher movie would be uninspiring coming from any writer-director, let alone one with several genre classics under his belt.

A puzzle with no solutions, a tale with a twist that isn't a twist at all.

What sinks it is Craven's simplistic, ham-fisted writing and inert direction.

It's your money that's at greater stake with this subpar horror entry in barely noticeable 3D.

A thrill-free snooze that will certainly rank as one of the least -- if not the least -- effective entries in Craven's nearly 40-year canon of cinematic shockers.

The filmmaker's red herrings prove depressingly incapable of hiding the real fiend's identity.

Is it just possible that Craven fumbled the ball this time and gave us the equivalent of a fairly amateur teen horror flick?

full review at Movies for the Masses

Clunky bird metaphors, blind kids grabbing for dangling ropes, a Horshack-ian best friend with an abusive stepfather, and a story that would be impossible if any of these kids drove a car, sum up most of the more obvious problems with the film.

Confused, poorly executed, sporadic and incredibly messy, but despite its pitfalls, My Soul to Take is an enormously entertaining bad movie.

...the film not only marks a low point within Craven's career but also within the horror genre itself.

It's talky, schlocky and stalk-y.

With either too much or too little happening on screen and a script juggling too many red herrings at once, My Soul to Take feels like Purgatory... in 3D.

The best thing about My Soul to Take is that it may force folks to revisit Wes Craven's past works and finally realize that he's always been nothing more than a hack in the horror field, a Uwe Boll with a better sense of where to place the camera.

My Soul to Take ends up being mere Chucky cheese.

While there's much to like about the ideas and atmosphere, Craven can't muster much out of his characters or script to form an interesting message.

Craven's writing starts out over the top and just keeps climbing ...

This utterly mediocre forget-me-now could've been crafted by any faceless serial director at all.

A typically ruthless and cynically comic horror thriller from Craven, set in a high school where the caste system is more terrifying than the possibility of a murderous ghost (the bullying leader of the mean girls is nicknamed 'Fang').

disappointing in the way it drags out its narrative to little effect, substituting cheap revelations and sometimes incoherent action for anything resembling the kind of innovation and verve that is the hallmark of Craven's best work