Carnival of Souls - 1998
Directed by Adam Grossman
Written by Adam Grossman
Based on a story by John Clifford
Starring Bobbie Phillips, Larry Miller & Shawnee Smith
From the six titles remaining I chose one that I thought I might possibly like - or would at least not be so tear-inducingly awful as such hateful garbage as
Loqueesha or $2 shop cheap as
A Talking Cat!?! This film,
Carnival of Souls boasted recognizable names. Obviously, being the executive producer doesn't mean much, so Wes Craven's name being used feels like a cheap name-drop - but this film features Larry Miller as it's villain, and has Shawnee Smith in a supporting role. It's a remake of an established, classic film - so story-wise, I thought I was covered. It appeared to be a horror film - so surely it would entertain on some level. I tried to be so open minded that I was willing myself in naivete - because I didn't know if I had another bottom-of-the-barrel watch in me. Well,
Carnival of Souls is a pretty bad film that I couldn't pretend to like. It's the broken dream of a filmmaker who was no good, and on his last chance. It features, as it's lead, an actress who can't really act - or at least glumly refuses to in this.
Writer/director Adam Grossman seems to have recently watched
Jacob's Ladder before making this version of
Carnival of Souls, because this borrows particularly heavily from that film. Unlike
Jacob's Ladder though, we're in on the fact that main character Alex Grant (Bobbie Phillips) is in some kind of dream state, and is either sleeping, dying or dead. She shifts and drifts from one hallucination to another, constantly mistaking each surreal transition and situation for reality. When you're watching the film, you'll notice that this all starts when she drives her car into a river while being held under duress by a nemesis - Louis Seagram (Larry Miller), a man who murdered her mother and abused her - a man who she testified against, sending him to prison for 20 years. Alex is now an adult, and Louis has been released, so when she's held by knifepoint she refuses to let him do what he wants with her. For the rest of the film she's accosted by cenobite-like monsters, nightmare-like occurrences and she drifts from bizarre situation to bizarre situation, often ending up in places like a fairground or the bar she works at. Louis shows up constantly - psychologically torturing her.
Bobbie Phillips is lifeless and terrible in this film - we get absolutely nothing from her, and so she's dreary to watch. Larry Miller injects a little life in proceedings, and is a suitably slimy and disagreeable villain - but he never quite convinced me that the performance was genuine. I was never watching a character, and was always cognizant that I was watching Larry Miller play somebody evil. Shawnee Smith is fine, and therefore seems out of place in this film. Occasionally, familiar nightmare-like moments lifted the tepid mood, but there's a cheap feel to everything, and I don't think Adam Grossman was a good enough director to inject real energy into the scenes as they play out. This would be his last directorial role of any kind - having only directed the straight-to-video release
Sometimes They Come Back Again, which was a sequel to
Sometimes They Come Back - based on a short story by Stephen King. Grossman would write the screenplay for
Sometimes They Come Back For More before falling off the map completely, failing to make it in movies or television.
Carnival of Souls looks really cheap - but cinematographer Christopher Baffa was a pro, and was director of photography on one film I like -
Suicide Kings. He hasn't had a huge career, but he's kept working, filming episodes of
American Horror Story and dividing his time between television and film. I can't say that the impression of the film's score was a good one, being something that I'd expect from an episode of
Freddy's Nightmares rather than a theatrical film. Composer Andrew Rose has a sparse filmography, and not one that's going to impress on a resume. There are even a few transitions that don't work out too well, though it's tough to blame editor David Handman (
Jason Goes to Hell : The Final Friday and
Jason X) if he hasn't been given footage to seamlessly blend all of these transitions together. The film had a good art director in Erin Cochran and an Emmy Award-winning production designer in Aaron Osborne, who often pairs up with Cochran - though they were both just getting established, and had yet to work on big films like
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and
Keanu.
I believe that most of the blame for this iteration of
Carnival of Souls being as bad as it is - derivative and dull - basically goes to Adam Grossman. He's the weak link, he was the writer and he was the director. He was working with a decent crew and aside from his lead had a few talented actors ready to do his bidding. His
Sometimes They Come Back Again is regarded as a bad film, and this subsequent one killed his career for good. The entire story is one long gimmick that never ends - so there's not really much plot to speak of, only an endless series of dreams, one after the other. When the one character who dominates the film is disappointingly dull and flat, even freaky dreams can't lift this into an even remotely interesting place to take it all in. It all familiarly feels like one of those horror anthology television shows, except instead of 20 minutes, it lasts over an hour longer - far too long to sustain what it's trying to do. Even 20 minutes of this would have started to grind a little. The monsters look a little silly, and made me laugh once or twice. I can't emphasize enough how much I disliked Bobbie Phillips' performance.
Someone who loved the original 1962
Carnival of Souls, hoping that this would deliver even half of what that film did would have been deeply disappointed in this film. Even angry. Knowing how bad it was going to be, I didn't mind watching it too much. Unlike
Wild 90 it at least continually throws things at us in an attempt to be edgy and frightening. Unlike
The Misty Green Sky, it had a budget. Unlike
Loqueesha, it wasn't overbearingly offensive and exhausting. It was pretty bad though, and not up to theatrical standard. I've seen plenty of stuff like this on television, which often sinks to low standards when trying to bring off high concept ideas in the horror genre. I'm not saying that there was anything brilliant or visionary about this film's narrative, but Grossman's ideas couldn't fully be realised in respect to what he was trying to do - as humble as it was. He seems to have lacked talent as well as experience, and was in way over his head - and when he has nightmares, chances are they're about the reception this film got after turning out the way it did.