Soul Searcher

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.

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.

...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.

For a film that I have just read cost £20k, it was brilliant. however, i feel that certain areas not to do with how much it cost needed some attention! The script needed a bit more clarity and development. I thought the editing wasn't as tight as it could be - there needed to be more pace. But the sound, camera work/lighting were fab for its budget. Generally he got some high production values in - The fight scenes were choreographed pretty well too. I feel filmmakers like this should be encouraged, and I hope he finds a good team to help him out next time - he does deserve some decent funding. It's a very imaginative first attempt - well done! People like him should be helped out in the British film industry more. It's refreshing not to see yet another boring low budget drama or 'gritty' movie - they always seem to get made. It just goes to show that in this case low budget doesn't have to mean boring

the first time I tried to watch this I got bored and switched it off!

I gave it another shot and it does get better towards the end and looks impressive, just a shame the dialogue/story is so poor. What was achieved with the low budget is actually quite impressive visually, apart from a few dodgy effects. I think what this film would've benefited from is a stronger script.

One thing I can praise is the effort gone into the DVD extra's. I found the extra documentary, film school masterclass more entertaining than the film itself!

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