6 Souls/Shelter

"Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away..."

The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter - 1969

Last night, Christine Hadden and myself decided it was high time to dust off our morals, spit shine our values and re-dedicate ourselves to good old American values. On the night of Trumps' first address to the nation as our president, we knew we owed it to the Red, White & Blue to salute the brave and the free, keep a baked apple pie in our hearts at all times and wash our sins clean in the blood of Jesus.

I'm just kidding. 

Last night, Christine and I had nothing at all to do, and we both agreed that we would rather pull out all our pubic hairs one by one with a rusty pair of pliers and then apply a generous ghost pepper juice bikini to our raw parts than watch the Circus Peanut Colored Shit Sandwich flap the raw sewage dumpster lid that is his mouth for 90 minutes. 

Initially, I had chosen the film The Charnel House for us to watch and review. But ten minutes in, we both needed a pause to run and fetch our alcohol - wine for her, Jose Cuervo's Strawberry Lime Margarita ($10 in a big plastic bottle!) for me. We slammed some booze and gave it another ten or fifteen minutes, but ultimately we just couldn't take it. The characters were too stereotypical, the acting too wooden, the dialogue so rigidly structured that it wasn't so much backstory as it was steel girders for the architecturally challenged. Christ, what a shitshow. At the point where Victim #1 - a white slab of ugli fruit who looks like he should be running Noah's Arcade and sounds like he's aiming for the Gold Star in Olympic Level Enunciation - is meeting his doom in the basement with a ghost cow, we gave up and started scrolling again.

Also, the kid who played Steve in Stranger Things was in The Charnel House. I felt it merited mentioning because that was obviously the films only draw.

Christine: Have you seen 6 Souls?
Me: Nope.
Christine: Julianne Moore is in it...could be good, could go the other way.
Me: She was also in Freedomland. BARF! But it can't be as bad as Charnel House.

So we clicked it, and waited while the opening credits spooled, and suddenly came to a horrific realization. 

Me: EW! Weinstein Co!
Christine: Oh Jesus H. Christ. 

So the film opens with Julianne Moore - here playing Dr. Cara Harding (not to be confused with Dr. Sarah Harding, a role Moore played in Jurassic Park 3) - sitting in a room surrounded by a bunch of flabby guys in expensive suits, talking about another guy who raped a twelve year old girl. Yep, this is definitely a Weinstein film. 

After sucking back six shots of tequila and waking up in a hotel room bed (the metaphors just keep stacking up, don't they?) Cara gets a call from her daddy who wants her to check out a vagrant that the cops picked up back in their hometown of Pittsburgh. Yeah, just what I would want to do after an eight hour flight with a hangover, thanks dad. 

Some quick background: Cara is a widow. Her husband was killed three years earlier by a throat slashing mugger, her 8 to 10 year old daughter Sammi is standard issue adorable, her brother is a likable nerd who worships George Romero and Joy Division, her dad is played by Jeffrey DeMunn and they're both reputable psychologists seemingly specializing in proving that split personality disorder does not exist. There's your fucking back story, now lets get on with this mess.

The man that Cara's daddy wants her to interview is a homeless, wheelchair bound cracker named George, whose demeanor is calm, polite and unfailingly respectful. Unsure why she's wasting her time like this, Cara checks in with dad, who has been watching through the one way mirror. Dad (who is kind of creepy and not at all unwilling to apparently place his daughter in bodily danger if it means getting her to think outside the box) places a call into the interrogation room. When George answers, Dad asks to speak with Adam. One massive seizure later...

Christine: ...and now he's from Boston?

Adam emerges, a tough guy from Beantown who doesn't need a wheelchair and is colorblind in one eye. Or, in his own words: "Doesn't need ah wheel chah and is culuh bland in one ah." So great, so far these two personalities encompass both Christine's neighborhood and mine. Well, "mine" being about an hour's drive away but close enough as to make no discernible difference. Both accents are pretty damn good considering actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers is Irish. 

This film is very long and very convoluted...and very confusing when you've been buoying yourself with alcohol and the hour growth late, so I'm going to try and tighten this up as best I can. Like the editor should have done. 

Cara discovers that wheelchair bound southern boy George was a real person, so she drives into the Arkansas section of Pennsylvania to find out what she can about him. And she does so dressed like this. 

Which is something you should never ever do when you're involved in a psychological murder mystery that has Satanic undertones and overtures and weird astrological symbols and dead animals and people barfing up dirt and dolls hanging from telephone wires requires you to venture out into the countryside all alone to try and dig up some answers and the only thing you see is some morbidly beer-swollen biker bastard milking a rattlesnake at the side of the road and you're all like "Uh, maybe this wasn't such a good idea."

Ya think? I mean shit, have you never seen The Omen 2? 

Cara finds George's mama, who informs Cara that George has been dead for twenty five years. Apparently, after a freak fall paralyzed him and sent him to Wheelchair Central, George lost his faith and succumbed to a bunch of Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches, who murdered him in the woods late one snowy night. No really, she actually said "Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches." 


Christine: "Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches. My new band."
Me: "Oh let me guess...they were all listening to Ozzy Osbourne too."
Christine: "Of course!"

So Cara decides it would be a nifty idea to roll George on out to the scene of the real George's death and see what happens. Fucking brilliant. Hey, Imma take Jeffrey Dahmer on a field trip to a meat processing plant, just for funsies! A left behind newspaper helpfully informs us that this is the site of the George's Satanic ritualistic murder. Even better, the article is written by one Kevin Raper.

Me: "HAHAHA, Kevin RAPER?! This IS a Weinstein movie!"
(yes, I know that Kevin Raper is actually the name of one of the art directors on this film. I don't care. If my surname was Raper I'd be changing that shit faster than a stripper changes her thong panties.)

George freaks out, starts crying and wants to go home but stupid Cara can't shift his wheelchair out of the rut, so she turns her back, walks away and goes totally stone deaf, unable to hear the huge fucking racket George is making as yet another personality emerges. She's on her cell phone, calling the orderly who parked seven football field-lengths away for some reason, to come assist them. It's a 10 second call. By the time she hangs up, Adam/George has left his wheelchair behind, has somehow managed to circle around her without his feet making a single sound in the 6 inch thick carpet of crunchy fallen autumn leaves and now faces her angrily. His accent is now flat and he says his name is Wes, and he's sick and fucking tired of waking up in different places all the time and what the hell is going on, lady? 

Me: "She couldn't hear that shit? You could hear a mouse fart out here!"
Christine: "Presto-chango!"
Me: "Okay, so maybe this is like Angel Heart?"
Christine: I actually loved Angel Heart!"

Unfortunately, it's not Angel Heart at all. More like Identity meets Pumpkinhead, with some Silence of the Lambs thrown in. 

Anyway, fast forward about 20 clicks and we learn that Wes was a heavy metal singer who worshipped Satan and I totally fucking called it 20 minutes ago when I said that the Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches were listening to Ozzy Osbourne or some shit, I nailed it! So now throw in 1986's Trick Or Treat too because all Satan worshippers listen to heavy metal and vice versa and FUCK YOU, movie! Imma let you finish, but you couldn't redeem yourself now if you had a thousand Hail Mary's and a whole entire gallon of rattlesnake milk! 

So, anyone George/Adam/Wes comes into contact with breaks out in a rash and starts violently coughing, all sure signs that they're next. First it's a close family doctor friend of the family who shows up at Sammi's soccer practice in Adam's body. Then dad starts coughing. Soon, little Sammi is scratching at a rash on her back. Oooooh, the noose growth tighter and I giveth less shits. Cara is told that it might be in her best interest to visit the Holler Granny. Ugh, here we go. 

Christine: "She must have driven down to WVA...geez."
Me: "Do they even have hollers in Pittsburgh?"
Christine: "No they do not, Loretta."

So off to Butcher/Razorback/Hainted Holler we go. Cara drives onto the set of Pumpkinhead and finds Larry, Darryl and Darryl in their oversized outhouse, living alongside Granny Holler and Granny's frizzy-haired albino great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter/witches familiar. Granny runs a pretty lucrative outpatient surgery facility, extracting gall bladders without all of that pesky hand-washing and anesthesia. Granny - who last brushed her teeth when Eisenhower was in office - simply sucks people's souls out of their bodies and stores them in jars while she cuts them open. I'm sure it's cheaper, but I'll stick with the backwards count from 100 and risk the post-op nausea if it's all the same ti you. At least they give you Dilaudid afterwards. 

Meanwhile, back at the babysitter's bachelor pad, Cara's brother has discovered that the shadowy entity seen hanging over Adam/George/Whoever in the hospital room from about an hour earlier in the film is not a figure but rather a sound wave which, when translated, turns out to be some mumbo jumbo ooga booga crapola (which my computer insisted upon translating into Yoga Boogie Crayon, which probably would have been a more interesting plot point) which reveals that Adam/Etc is a century old snakeoil charlatan who did some bad shit and ended up getting his soul sucked out and his mouth stuffed full of grave dirt by some other Holler Granny (or maybe the same one, who the fuck knows). The evil charlatan looked exactly like Jonathan Rhys Meyers and so Cara knows they're fucked. No modern science stuff can possibly save them now so it's back to the holler to save Sammi's soul and by this time it was almost 10pm and I was drunk and tired and just really badly wanted it to be over. 

Christine: "Too many storylines trying to merge. Too many arms on this octopus. I don't remember this being in theaters and I can see why."

Rhys Meyers spends his last five minutes of screen time fast-marching through the dark woods after Cara and Sammi like Jason Fucking Voorhees. Pretty much everybody dies except Cara and Sammi...or DOES SHE? And cue last significant spooky little Ring girl nod to the camera. And cue my fist itching to punch through the screen. 

Christine: "I'm laughing out loud at this point. This probably could have been a good film if it had been split into about 4 different movies."

I'm of the opinion that it already has been four different movies: Angel Heart, Identity, Pumpkinhead and Soultaker, the latter without benefit of MST3k. Ultimately, 6 Souls is so over plotted and meticulously constructed that it collapses under its own weight into a messy scatter of ridiculous. 
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