Popping in the follow-up to SCARY TALES, I really wasn't expecting an SOV kitchen sink melodrama, but lord help me, that's what I got. It's a lot more proficiently produced than that earlier feature, but unfortunately so directionless it loses interest, even at a scant 62 minutes.
The film follows a couple loser slackers around Baltimore, who aimlessly drift from job to job, pissing off customers and their managers until they get fired in short order. When one of them (Al Darago, who would go on to much better SOV things a few years later in the entertaining SCREEN KILL) groks to a grave-digging job, the guys find themselves on easy street, pilfering the effects of the recently deceased to hawk for spare income.
DARKEST SOUL (which, as far as I could tell, never actually displayed its title onscreen) keeps feinting like it's about to become a horror picture, then ducking back, returning to a burned-out blue-collar wasteland of crummy parties and go-nowhere lives. When things finally come to a head in the last minutes of the film, it actually reminded me of nothing less than "The Pardoner's Tale" from THE CANTERBURY TALES. I can't imagine whether Ulrich and company had this in mind when they made it, but it does lend an air of interest to the proceedings that the directionless 55 minutes before sorely lacked.
It's hard to determine quite how to rate DARKEST SOUL. I was impressed that it didn't just go for the easy out - another cheap horror flick - and tried to do something different and more down-to-earth. Unfortunately, it's just not terribly entertaining, and is mostly a directionless slog that grows wearisome. In the end, you have to grade the film you watched rather than the film you can tell it wanted to be, and on that level, DARKEST SOUL is a failure, if at least a step up in ambition from the director's previous film.
