I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Chiller, You Can Stop Making 'Original' Films Now Please




Dead Souls (2012)

I don't know why when Chiller says it has a new movie coming up I actually look forward to it. While Steve Nile's Remains wasn't that bad, it's a good bet that if Chiller has an original movie, it's going to be a snore fest. This was certainly no different. How they managed to snag Bill Moseley (Devil's Rejects) beats the hell out of me.

We get a story 17 years back of a preacher going nutzo (surprise surprise) because somehow he has combined the stories of Jesus and Osiris together to make a new religion (What the every loving hell?) and, as these new religions go, there's gotta be sacrifice. So he takes his family (except for a baby who was hidden) and nails them to crosses he's constructed in the barn. The younger son (who hid the baby) managed to call the cops before dying, and when the cop gets there (just ONE cop for a mass murder, okay) he finds them all pinned, the preacher says they're 'one short' and supposedly he finds the baby in the basement.

Skip ahead to the present where Johnny Petrie is celebrating his 18th birthday. Gee, I wonder who he REALLY is (heavy sarcasm)? His mom pops prescription drugs like pez and is also ultra psycho religious (That doesn't quite go together, does it?) which means Johnny can't have friends, a cell phone, extra-curricular activities or go to college. One day his mom pops one pill too many and goes to the hospital. Johnny finds a letter addressed to him stating he has inherited property in Maine (he lives in New York). He gets there by train and is immediately greeted by three teenage toughs who say he shouldn't have shown up and needs to go back (Why - what the hell would they know?) but he ignores them and goes to the lawyer's office. He's driven out to the family farm (What? You guessed who he was already? You cheeky monkey...) and discovers his real name is Bryan Conroy, and his family died in some sort of 'accident'. His 'mother' is actually his aunt. Since she's in the hospital and can't get a hold of him, he decides to stay a day or two and explore. The electricity and phone (water always being there I guess) have been turned on for prospective buyers.

There he meets a squatter, Emma, who he persuades to stay. From the beginning we get the standard 'spooky' stuff that anyone with a crayon could write - shadows in windows, whooshing shapes going by, doors opening and closing, etc. Boring boring boring. A German Shepherd keeps showing up and attacks 'Bryan' so Emma kills it (bitch). No worries though, the dog soon is up and running around again. And a crow follows 'Bryan' around and 'gives' him a feather. Crows figured prominently in Egyptian mythology as you probably already know. This is not a deep movie by any means.

Anyway, as the now retired and perpetually drunk ex-sheriff (Bill Moseley) tells him 'You woke them all up!' 'cause the whole family had been dedicated by blood ceremony to Jesus Christ who gave his life due to the goodness of Osiris (hey I'm not making this up, it's that stupid) and he should have died with the rest. It was his big brother who saved his ass, apparently it will have to be his dead brother to save it again. See, these family members want him to 'complete' the ritual so they will have eternal life, not just this ghostly whooshing around they're doing (although the dog looks pretty solid).

Eventually because that is how these things go, everybody who tries to help him (or in the case of the teenage tough who turns out to be his half-brother because his father 'wasn't the most faithful of husbands' to hurt him) dies and if they're dead, the family can use them - and do - to complete the 'ritual'. But he's told that the phrase 'being short one' didn't mean him, it meant the fifth nail, supposed to go through the heart and denied Christ so he would die in agony (total bull this is so stupid it's hard to type). So, too late to save any of the people around him, eventually all the reanimated family members get a sharp one to the heart. Yay. 

The movie ends (way too late) with 'Bryan' trying to explain it to the new sheriff who had heard all the stories the old sheriff tried to tell him, believing none of it then but beginning to now, and he's taken to the hospital to, I dunno, recover so he can go out and ruin some more lives since, as he tells the sheriff, he's 'home'. Oh brother. Chiller, stick to your regular rotation of bad movies, you really don't need to make any of your own.