Cinematically, Satan has become like your crazy Uncle Pete. When you only saw him every couple years in your childhood, his magic tricks and Peter Lorre impressions seemed really cool and funny. But after Uncle Pete got laid off from the plastics plant and moved into your basement and suddenly you started to see him every darned day... well, he stopped being quite so funny and he stopped being quite so interesting and you began to wish he would just get a job and stop sitting on the couch eating Funions and yelling at the television.

Basically, surely the Prince of Darkness has better things to do than to mope around New York bothering Winona Ryder and looking for bland nonfiction authors to inhabit. Or maybe he has better things to do than to go around tormenting Arnold Schwarzenegger and trying to impregnate Robin Tunney. And surely he has better things to do than trying to get Keanu Reaves to work at his law firm. He should stop messing with poor Mickey Rourke. He should break his pact with Frank Langella and leave Johnny Depp alone. And one can only hope that whatever he was doing to poor Kim Basinger in Bless the Child (I missed that one) didn't waste too much of Lucifer's time.

For Heaven's Sake, Get a Life, Satan!!!!!

See, the thing we forget about Janusz Kaminski, what with the Oscars and the great work with Spielberg, is that for all of his good moments, the guy also served as the cinematographer on the Vanilla Ice vehicle Cool As Ice. And there but for the grace of Steven Spielberg goes Janusz Kaminski's career. But never forget that Holly Hunter's ex-husband is just one step removed from complete and total hack work.

That's pretty much what Lost Souls is. It's a demonic possession thriller with no brains, no soul, no thrills, no chills, no payoffs, and no self-awareness. The film has style to burn, but towards what end? Lost Souls is painfully self-serious rehash of every Anti-Christ film since Rosemary's Baby. But Rosemary's Baby was a pitch-black dark comedy, that used its black humor to make everything all the more unsettling. Even before Lost Souls reaches its nadir with ten minutes to go (the film actually has *no* climax... it's amazing how totally unstructured the script is) the film is devoid of any kind of humanity. The characters are so glum that we don't even notice things getting worse for them. It's not really surprising that neither of the film's credited writers (Betsy Stahl and Pierce Gardner) has ever had a produced screenplay previously and that neither has had a script made in the three years since this film went into production.

The plot is tough to sum up because it's so uninteresting. It has something to do with Winona Ryder's Maya, who now teaches French at a parochial school, but was apparently possessed as a child. I say apparently because her possession is virtually irrelevant to the film. She has no special knowledge and no special insight mostly it's just made her morose. Now she's looking for the man who is the fulfillment of some prophesy that Satan is about to take human form and probably do bad things to no believers. The form he's planning on taking is that of Ben Chaplin. We know this because two or three totally indistinct signs and a random number code point to him. Also, he lives in a cold New York apartment next to a little old woman with an accent just like Ruth Gordon in Rosemary's Baby (only predictably not as interesting). Shockingly, Ben doesn't believe that he's about to be inhabited by the Devil but against all odds, Winona proves to him that the not-really-unthinkable is about to happen.

Lost Souls begins with a mind-numbingly stupid quote from Deuteronomy about the Anti-Christ. It's immediately clear that the quote is fake because what on Earth would the Anti-Christ have to do with any of the laws set forth in Deuteronomy. Did the writers just select an arbitrary book from the Bible to make up a quote from? That's pretty offensive. But Lost Souls has no real connection to religious faith and there isn't a single piece of information in the film that couldn't have been learned from watching other movies. It's lazy, bad writing.

You'll notice I'm picking on the writing. I'm not trying to suggest that Janusz Kaminski did what he could with tough subject matter, but was foiled by an idiotic script. No. Lost Souls is badly directed as well. Nothing in the film cuts together to create suspense. Or provocation. Everything feels disjointed. There are gorgeous images and nice shots periodically. Mauro Fiore makes everything much too murky (and the resulting video transfer is a disgrace), but occasionally there are revelatory moments, generally involving religious iconography. Sometimes Fiore gives the film the spirituality that the writers botched so badly.

Once upon a time Winona Ryder was an Oscar-nominated actress considered one of the best of her generation. But here she's forced to utter horrible dialogue like "If you really believed in God, father, why is it so inconceivable to you that his adversary could be just as real," without a shred of irony. That's just just bad writing and Ryder's misplaced faith in the dignity of this character just makes it seem worse.

And once upon a time Ben Chaplin looked like a potential movie star leading man. But the effortless charm he showed in The Truth About Cats and Dogs has pretty much been AWOL ever since. His performance here is totally charisma free. He's not bad, but he's certainly dull.

And the rest of the cast is peppered with decent actors who have to eat. Elias Koteas? Totally wasted. Phillip Baker Hall? Totally wasted. And John Hurt goes in the wasted pile as well.

This movie took forever to get released and you can see why. I just wonder if somewhere there's a longer version of the movie in which we actually learn something about any of the characters and in which something beyond mood develops. Because even if that version is longer, it couldn't be worse.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age
Special Effects: Well at least you can't see the strings