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The 1692 Salem witch trials failed to catch up with a man
whose sorcery blurred the border between nightmares and reality.
He was the Keeper of Souls, or maybe even the Devil himself.
Switch to present day and Stacy, a woman who has regular nightmares
of herself running from monkish figures and being captured
for a ritual ceremony. When her grandmother Rose dies, she
and her husband take the ashes back to the area where she
was born. Renting an old and remote house on the edge of town,
Stacy finds that her visions intensify and her husband Cliff
discovers a body at the edge of the lake, which may or may
not be that of a local missing girl...
This
is one of the most horrifying films I have ever seen, but
not for the reasons you might hope. It's simply so bad that
the thought of sticking it back in my video player terrifies
me. I'm certain that's not what writer and director Tim Card
had in mind. There's no cohesion to the plot and the structuring
is all over the place. What seems important one moment is
forgotten the next. The dry ice mist-effect is very much overused,
close-up shots are repeated several times, and there is even
a temporary film noir-style switch to monochrome for no apparent
reason.
And
that's not all. The budget must have been tiny, because the
'actors' continue after fluffed lines. The scene-cutting is
worse than amateur, with regular switches to new scenes before
the spoken dialogue from the previous one has finished - yes,
half way through a sentence! The sound on the film comes and
goes; sometimes background noise is prominent, blocking out
delivered lines, and occasionally there doesn't appear to
be any sound at all when you would expect minimal ambience.
For a short movie there are many time wasting slow-motion
sequences. A cheap scare has a body shoot out of the swamp
water and sink once more, again for no reason. Even a gun
is left handy near the unconscious body of our hero so that
he can shoot-up the place at the end.
I
really would like to say something nice about Keeper of
Souls for balance, but there's no lifeline to grab hold
of. This is not so bad it's good, it's just rubbish.
Ty
Power
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