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Year:   2000
Studio: Castle Rock Entertainment
Movie:  2/5
DVD:    2/5

Lost Souls is a low-key thriller about a woman, Maya Larkin (Winona Ryder), who believes that a man, Peter Kelson (Ben Chaplin) is destined to host Satan on his 33rd birthday. It has a lot of Catholic religion yet is not as interesting as, say, Stigmata which showed a bit more of the church bureaucracy. It moves kind of slowly and it lacks something, suspense or excitement.

At least the ending is nice in that Maya has to shoot Peter just after Satan takes a hold of him. They're sitting in Peter's SUV, she has the gun, it's 4:54 the time of Peter's birth and they're waiting to see what happens. At first it seems like everything is fine. But then she glances at the car clock, which flickers to 6:66. Shot of Peter as he starts getting this irrepresible smile that he can't keep off his face -- the smile that totally sells that he's now Satan. Then she shoot him in the head.

Other than that though, it's a boring movie. The commentary is even worse. Director Janusz Kaminski and cinematographer Mauro Fiore don't have anything interesting to say. Kaminski goes on and on about how he doesn't believe in any of this stuff and the evil-ness of prescreening movies. There are also certain parts of the commentary when their voices are blended in and out, purposely to create an otherworldy feeling. You know, I don't need stylistic foofaraw in an audio commentary. It's just annoying.
There are some deleted scenes. Actually half of them are variants of existing scenes, to show different how the scene could have been edited differently. For me, I found them boring since I don't want to see the same scenes over and over with minor variations

What I liked: the ending scene. Cinematography is also pretty good, delivering a convingly dark atmosphere without making it too commercial.

What I didn't like: everything else.

Copyright (c) 2004 Kevin C. Wong
Page Created: July 28, 2004
Page Last Updated: July 28, 2004