Soul Searcher

Soul Searcher tells an interesting story - what if a shy guy is offered the chance to become the Grim Reaper? The movie shows brief flashes of brilliance, especially the wonderfully detailed story about how the tradition of the Grim Reaper began. Unfortunately, that is the only interesting story that is fully told in this rocky turn at comicbook-becomes-reality.

The film's quality is low-budget (especially the banshee!), filmed at night and many of the scenes feel rushed. The acting is disjointed, with some actors being much better than others. Special effects suffer to the point that they can be laughable.

Yet somehow you care enough to root for the hero, who you know will vanquish the evil Dante....who might just be the man who wrote about hell centuries ago. To be honest, I'd love to see this story as an animated series. I want to know more about each character's story, and that just doesn't happen in this choppy movie. I'll keep my eyes out for more from director/producer/co-writer Neil Oseman.

More distinguished film critics than myself have determined that you should judge a film in terms of what it sets out to achieve. Director Neil Oseman set out to make a SFX laden action/adventure picture on a budget of around £20,000. You can't get a half decent four door saloon for that. So in my opinion the films existence should be applauded alone. But there's a lot of other good stuff going on. Above all else the film has a strong and consistent visual style which is complemented by some surprisingly good Harryhausen influenced special effects.

Obviously there are issues, but there are always going to be with a twenty grand extravaganza. They are mainly down to narrative issues, overall the story works very well, young man is trained to be grim reaper whilst falling in love and trying stop a madman for opening up the moat of souls. The problems lie with tiny things like ezekial just up and leaving before the big battle.

At the end of the day, if you read the directors journal, Neil Oseman Had to do EVERYTHING, co-write the script, and produce. All this on the tiniest of budgets with no help from the BFI or Screen West Midlands who are probably at this moment handing out cash for another gritty urban drama about something controversial. or a cockernee gangster film. Nobody makes this kind of film in this country anymore.

In the end, Soulsearcher is a great, entertaining movie that harks back to the likes of Back to the Future and Ghostbusters. If you can't see past the flaws to see whats been achieved then clearly low budget movies aren't for you.

Just rented this, another low budget British action martial arts… yawn. There are so many of these out there now that to be honest I'm starting to get bored. In the past two years a rash of badly acted and poorly shot British and even US low budget actioners have been released.

Working as I do for a cross Atlantic review site I get screeners of these and being that my speciality is action (and that I'm British) I get the dubious pleasure of reviewing an ever growing stack of DV features.

Soul Searcher is okay, a solid 2 ½ star movie. It's not badly acted, or badly directed, or badly shot but at the same time there was little to stand out. The central lead was dull and lacked life, and the film just felt like it needed something more to make it stand out.

As for the extras, it's an impressive pack to be sure but for my money the director should have been stopped from making his rather self involved behind the scenes documentary. If I hear how hard is was once more I will scream.

...faith, determination and guts producing an interesting indie movie against all odds. Some of the shots pulled off in this are flat-out incredible for such a low-budget flick, and the breakdowns of how these were achieved on the DVD make for fascinating viewing. I don't think I've ever seen someone try and pull off this kind of movie on this kind of budget before, and it's something to behold. The plot feels a bit muddled in places, (especially in the final third), but the pace never flags and neither does the level of invention. Anyone carping about rough edges has missed the point by a mile. I'm looking forward to seeing if the crew have enough energy to try this again further down the line, as I'll pounce on the DVD straight away if they do.

The one bit of SOUL SEARCHER trivia that no viewer can avoid is that it was produced for 28,000 pounds – the modern-day equivalent of about $53,000. While this shows that first-time director Neil Oseman is an extremely frugal filmmaker who can pull off a fully-fledged action-fantasy with the minimum of resources, I am sorry to say that it does not make for a very good movie. To me, SOUL SEARCHER is among the worst kinds of films – a chore to watch. There are some good things to it, but overall, this just isn't very fun.

The story: An unsuspecting young man (Ray Bullock, Jr.) is recruited by the Grim Reaper (Jonny Lewis) to take over his position and stop the plan of a supernatural entity (Aj Nicole) to merge earth and hell.

The primary occupation of director Oseman is cinematography, and as a result, the movie looks good at a glance – not at all like the jerky indie crud you usually associate with this kind of budget, despite the amplitude of hand-held camera-work. There are also some traditional effects used to create various supernatural imagery, and I appreciate the 80s throwback. However, beyond this, the movie is in bad shape. The editing could be a lot better and a lot of the computer-generated effects are not integrated particularly well. The relentless nighttime setting is depressing. Worst of all is the lack of interesting characters. Absolutely none of the people inhabiting this picture are either likable or intriguing enough to merit investment in the storyline, and as a result, a handful of cool plot devices (e.g. the umbilical cord concept of ghosts) are wasted.

Inexplicably, this is also a martial arts movie. The making-of feature goes on about how the filmmakers strived to add a Hong Kong flavor to the fights and how the Hong Kong style is superior to the western style, but these notions are meaningless because, for the most part, these fights suck. The eastern influence is indeed there in the kung fu choreography and the marginally longer shots, but the combatants are almost universally slow and often look very uncomfortable swinging swords and scythes at each other. Their poor pacing and the lack of sound effects do not help, to the point that I only give one of the seven brawls (the final showdown) a passing grade.

I really wanted to like this movie, but too many cinematic shortcomings converged to make this anything more than an exercise in viewer patience. The 98-minute runtime absolutely dragged, and the best part of this experience has been writing this review. Nick Oseman demonstrated that a lot can be done with relatively little money and a lot of determination, and I would be happy to see him helm a bigger-budgeted feature, but this passion project of his is not nearly as good as I had hoped it would be.