Blu-Ray Review: 'My Soul to Take'

Wes Craven may well be the most influencial and prolific horror film maker of all time. As creator of "Nightmare on Elm Street" and almost single-handedly responsible for the resurrection fo the slasher genre with"Scream," he's more than made his mark on the genre. Craven's latest film to hit home video is 2010's "My Soul to Take." The film was not very well received by critics or audiences, but let's look at the Blu-ray release to see if it brings something new to the table.

Visuals

The visual transfer is of pretty solid quality, and makes it one of the better looking recent horror movies when it comes to viewing in high definition. That said, viewers should be aware that this is a movie with a very dull visual palette, and thatthere's going to be a great deal of muted shades of gray by design. So while the transfer is well done there really isn't anything about the film's visual that's going to put your HD TV to work, there just isn't a whole long of visual pop to this film.

Audio

The audio is presented in 5.1 surround sound, and it's a pretty decent mix. The mix a bit front loaded, not making use of the back parts of a surround system as much as it could have. That's a fairly minor quibble though, as the mix is well balanced allowing the dialogue to come through clearly and not be drowned out by the more ambient sounds the way some horror movie mixes have done. There is also surround sound available on the Spanish and French language tracks for those who are so inclined.

Special Features

The film comes with a fairly standard array of special features, none being particularly in depth. There's the commentary track which features writer/director Wes Craven and several members of the cast. They cover the standard topics of character development, script revisions and various on set anecdotes. However none of them do so with very much enthusiasm, which is a shame because Craven in particular is capable of delivering a very insightful commentary when he's engaged. That just didn't seem to happen here.

There's also a selection of deleted scenes and alternate versions of existing scenes. The deleted scenes were clearly cut for pacing reasons and don't really reveal much new to the story. There's a total of 22 minutes of deleted footage for fans to sift through. The alternate endings, which the box makes out to be one of the big selling points, aren't really all that different from the ending used. They're just different enough to warrant being called "alternate" but wouldn't have really changed much about the film if they'd been used in place of the original ending. There's roughly six minutes of alternate material on the disc.

Final Thoughts

This Blu-Ray is a solid, if unremarkable, release and worth picking up for any who did enjoy the film. Given that it wasn't a hit it would have been easy for the studio to just dump this as a bare bones release, but they put in the effort to give any possible fans a reason to pick this up.