This review has very minor SPOILERS, so do not read it if you don't want minor details given away.
I rented `Evil Lives' recently because it looked like a neat little horror movie. Heck, it even featured Paul Bartel and Dawn Wells. It couldn't be that bad. But then the first person in the movie was Julie Strain, and I knew I had made a big mistake. My thoughts were confirmed fairly quickly. You see, this movie was made in 1992 under the name of `Soulmates.' Thanks to the recent horror movie craze, it was retitled and released as `Evil Lives' in 2000. The movie box tries to compare it to three great movies---`Stir of Echoes,' `The Sixth Sense,' and `The House on Haunted Hill'---three movies that bear zero resemblance to this.
The plot is foolish. A man and a woman centuries ago had a strange curse placed on them. The curse is never fully explained, but basically the man murders women so that the spirit of his dead wife can inhibit them for a few hours before the body decomposes and dies completely. After centuries of this, the man currently has the identity of a writer. He lures women into his clutches, kills them, and his wife takes charge for a short while. The writer's next pick is a college girl played by Arabella Holzbog, who you may or may not remember from `Stone Cold.' He botches the murder, and spends the rest of the movie stalking her, killing other people you don't care much about.
What is so bad about this is not the acting, but the script. It handles the curse in such stupid ways that you want to scream. Many times, it violates its own rules, especially in the hackneyed end. Holzbog is okay as the star, but those around her simply don't stand out. Except for Wells and Bartel, who only show up in amusing and all-too-short cameos. The director, who does poorly throughout what with sloppy production values and few special effects, made a real mistake in taking these two performances for granted. What he has left is a bad movie that nobody is going to see, no matter how many false comparisons are on the movie box. Zantara's score: 2 out of 10.
I rented `Evil Lives' recently because it looked like a neat little horror movie. Heck, it even featured Paul Bartel and Dawn Wells. It couldn't be that bad. But then the first person in the movie was Julie Strain, and I knew I had made a big mistake. My thoughts were confirmed fairly quickly. You see, this movie was made in 1992 under the name of `Soulmates.' Thanks to the recent horror movie craze, it was retitled and released as `Evil Lives' in 2000. The movie box tries to compare it to three great movies---`Stir of Echoes,' `The Sixth Sense,' and `The House on Haunted Hill'---three movies that bear zero resemblance to this.
The plot is foolish. A man and a woman centuries ago had a strange curse placed on them. The curse is never fully explained, but basically the man murders women so that the spirit of his dead wife can inhibit them for a few hours before the body decomposes and dies completely. After centuries of this, the man currently has the identity of a writer. He lures women into his clutches, kills them, and his wife takes charge for a short while. The writer's next pick is a college girl played by Arabella Holzbog, who you may or may not remember from `Stone Cold.' He botches the murder, and spends the rest of the movie stalking her, killing other people you don't care much about.
What is so bad about this is not the acting, but the script. It handles the curse in such stupid ways that you want to scream. Many times, it violates its own rules, especially in the hackneyed end. Holzbog is okay as the star, but those around her simply don't stand out. Except for Wells and Bartel, who only show up in amusing and all-too-short cameos. The director, who does poorly throughout what with sloppy production values and few special effects, made a real mistake in taking these two performances for granted. What he has left is a bad movie that nobody is going to see, no matter how many false comparisons are on the movie box. Zantara's score: 2 out of 10.