‘4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker’ Review
Stars: Katherine Browning, Leah Verrill, Ashley Love, Tiffany S. Walker | Written and Directed by Mike Campbell, Todd Johnson
Lily (Browning), her best friend Bianca (Walker), sister Lori (Love), and Lori’s lover Pam (Verrill) move into their first off campus house together. The antics and the tempers run high. What they don’t know is that the owner is a Nalusa Chito – a soul taker – who eats the souls of evil women. And he has locked them in the house. For the girls, it is a battle to the death because only the innocent can kill him. Paying the rent has never been so deadly.
Let me just check the date… This is 2013 right?
Had to check as watching 4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker took me right back to the late 80s/early 90s and the types of films that filled the shelves of video stores during that time. Four chicks in a house being tormented by evil: Sorority House Massacre, Slumber Party Massacre, Nighty Nightmare et al., films featuring actresses way too old to be students sharing a sorority house, prancing around in their underwear before being bumped off…
Only the women of 4 Dead Girls don’t even prance around in their underwear. Yes, despite featuring numerous sex scenes, both straight and lesbian, the woman of this film are remarkably shy about removing their clothing. Which, for a film so steeped in that tradition, is kind of disappointing.
The film opens with a rather chilling sequence in which Nalusa Chito stalks and kills his first victim, the owner of the house our four “heroines” later move into. However from then on the film goes downhill, kind of fast. Firstly the film has a really inconsistent tone – one minute it’s ball-to-the-wall horror, the next it’s almost Scooby-Doo like slapstick. I guess it doesn’t help when a number of the female cast can’t deliver the admittedly poor script without sounding ike they’re taking the piss (Leah Verrill I’m looking at you).
The idea of a soul eater has been used before in horror cinema to much better effect. In the case of 4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker, Nalusa Chito is nothing more than a guy in a hooded robe and there’s absolutely nothing scary about that. Although that being said, I did like the old-school effects as Chito sucked the souls out of his victims.
Not a great film but not a truly awful movie, 4 Dead Girls – despite looking well-polished with some decent production values – is decidedly average, the type of film you’re better off waiting to catch on one of the many movies channels that proliferation satellite TV these days.
4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker is out now on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures.
