Sometimes I get to thinking that watching new Wes Craven movies is like going to a summer camp that you never liked very much. You see the same people, most of whom you don’t like, and you eat the same godawful food and you do the same inane garbage you did the last time you were there, and yet, despite it all, you still had a bit of fun because it’s so spectacularly familiar. Wes Craven takes the phrase “you can’t go home again”, laughs uproariously and tramples it into the ground. That’s exactly what I got after getting out of My Soul To Take, Wes’ latest romp which further underscores why I can’t stop calling him “Nerve Gas” Craven.

Anyway, Nerve Gas’ newest romp, My Soul to Take, takes us to Riverton, a town with a past and a schizophrenic serial killer who favors what looks like an augmented carpet knife that will almost certainly be available in catalogs somewhere because Craven is absolutely in love with this knife and shows it at every opportunity. The knife is actually a major figure in the plot, that’s how bad this is. Anyway, our serial killer got turned into kibble in an ambulance wreck sixteen years ago, and that’s where we join our protagonists, the so-called “Riverton Seven”, all born (most prematurely) on the day the killer died. And now, the Riverton Seven are all winding up dead in largely the same fashion, by various knife-related injuries. Is the killer back? Does he have a copycat? Or is something even more sinister going on?

The answer to all those questions is actually yes.

You’ll be left to try and make sense out of the resulting disaster that follows.

Craven’s work is laden with red herrings, sufficient to make me wonder if he used to write for Scooby Doo or something, because every time I follow Craven’s newest Scooby Gang through a movie, they’ll keep throwing up all new and equally breathless signs pointing, absolutely, to somebody to be behind the murders, until the next sign jumps up that makes it unimpeachably clear that this is totally the killer, until he’s not, and so on until the end of the movie.

The dialogue forced on the characters would be hard to swallow in the hands of experienced actors, let alone the competent no-names (I recognize no one, anyway) Nerve Gas managed to pull together for this romp. And the ending is like some kind of bad joke–did they actually tell the killer to go away, and he did? It may well rank among some of the worst endings in horror film that I’ve seen lately.

Either I misunderstood it, in which case once again Nerve Gas has put up yet another pile of sludge that’s so tough to follow that it’s virtually unwatchable, or I totally understood it, in which case once again Nerve Gas has put up yet another pile of sludge that’s so poorly written that it’s virtually unwatchable.

Let me just say that I thoroughly regret seeing My Soul To Take, and the fact that I had to see this garbage in 3D only makes it less pleasant.

The Screenhead Ten Scale needs no prodding to take this pathetic mess and hand it a two out of ten, in recognition of its couple of decent frights buried in the mass of godawful slop that is the rest of the movie.

Oh great, just what we all needed.  Yet another in a long string of Wes “Nerve Gas” Craven’s horror oeuvre.

Some of you may wonder why I constantly refer to him as Nerve Gas Craven–it’s because I’ve seen the films in his portfolio and thus far I find him to have all the subtlety of an open drum of Sarin, thus I call him Nerve Gas Craven.  Sure, it’s worked for him before–the Pulse remake was pretty sweet, I think, especially since he remade a movie that actually had way too MUCH subtlety, so the blend of maximum subtlety and Craven’s own anti-subtlety worked out nice.

Apparently he’s expressed at least some interest in a movie called Sunflower, in which a college professor abducts a young coed and forces her to become part of his little insane world.  Sounds par for the course for Craven, so there’s no wonder he’s interested.  Of course, last I knew, he was already working on another horror flick called 25/8, now called My Soul To Take, but that’s slated for release later this year so he’ll have room on the schedule.

Not that I’m particularly happy about the announcement, but I’m prepared to give the benefit of the doubt that maybe he can get one right under the Broken Clock Theory.  After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.