Filmic Friday 9

Movie: Soulkeeper
Format: VHS

While the heat slowly climbs from a fairly comfortable 75℉ to its likely pinnacle of 83℉, and the humidity climbs with it (we're at 52% now), I'm sitting here, mopping up spilled coffee (tv trays, however nice, are not exactly stable) and trying to convince the internet that this movie does, in fact, exist.

I cannot find the VHS lenticular cover to put here!

Soulkeeper was released in 2001, but it reeks of a late 1990s attempt at the horror-comedy genre. Brought to our group by Film & Editing Friendo's mother, who found it in a thrift store for hopefully no more than a quarter, we ended up watching this romp for our Anime & Video Games Friendo's birthday. Happy birthday, Friendo!

If you think you recognize the guy in the monk hood, you've A) got sharp eyes, and B) you're a big old wrestling nerd.

That's Tiny Lister. If you don't recognize the name, you might recognize him more as Zeus, from No Holds Barred (yeah, that movie).

And he's just as hammy and fantastic here, though he talks a LOT more.

To describe the plot of this movie would be nearly as impossible as to do so for a Neil Breen film, but I'll give it a go.

Evil McBadguy (the creepy eyes guy next to the Special Features bracket) is continually hopping from meat-suit to meat-suit using some stupid rock on a thong and doing altogether evil things because, of course, he's the Antichrist. We didn't have as much to be anxious about, globally, in the late 1990s, guys. The New York City skyline was very different and we feared things like the Antichrist more than literal Armageddon from nuclear bombs. We were done with nukes - the Cold War was over. That's how it felt growing up between 1989 and 2001. I'm sorry it couldn't have stayed that relatively peaceful (I say relatively because I know for damn sure that it was really only the USA that lacked anxiety in that time period, what with the genocides and civil wars and all going on in Europe and Africa...).

I digress.

Evil McBadguy (aka Simon Magus) needs a new meat suit, since he's had his for a good long time, and he has, unfortunately, set his sights on these two idiots.

And yes, they are just as dumb as they look.

These chuckleheads are brothers who are also thieves. We first meet them trying to steal Lincoln's hat for some guy parodying Charlie from Charlie's Angels (voiced by the incomparable and apparently slumming Michael Ironside), complete with white room and telephone. It's stupid. This movie is stupid. But it's still a lot of fun.

Idiot with suspenders is a hapless fool who just wants to be loved by a very specific grocery order of a woman "red hair, glasses, she doesn't think she's beautiful, she loves cars, she likes to be called sweetie-pie"... it's period-typical, but I'm pretty convinced that all this stupid girl-quest nonsense has led us to this world where guys are so pathetic that they've come up with idiotic terms like "incel" and whine about how it should be their right to use women as sex-dispensing machines instead of accepting that sometimes, sex just won't happen for you because you're an asshole and not because women are evil.

Rant aside, these guys are brain dead. Seriously. Black jacket there? He spent all his money on their mothers' grave, which he had speakers installed in. That part's hilarious, actually. The whole graveyard scene is freaking hilarious.

I wish I could show you pictures of all the actors as their characters, but the internet refuses to cough up the goods and I am techno-illiterate when it comes to transferring pictures from VHS to PC. If anyone has a copy of this movie and wants to throw a bunch of stills up on the internet, please, please do. And while you're at it, get some good shots of that sweet-ass lenticular VHS cover. 90s AF.

Right - I was trying to do the plot.

Simon Magus needs a new body. He's chosen to pursue these idiot brothers for now because apparently they're 100% steeped in sin. They're contracted, instead, by a man called Pascal (Brad Dourif!) to get something from a grave, which they do. He ends up dead, and they follow the clues they just retrieved from the spooky graveyard. They wind up at a weird vampire/demon sex party with boobs and girls kissing and one of them does it with a girl who keeps changing to turn into girls he had crushes on throughout his life. Surprise, she's a succubus (even though it's never stated).

The wings pop out as she's faking an orgasm, which is a really cool effect!

At one point, one of the guys ends up freaking out because his succubus has become his mother (mood-killer). They're captured and strung up, one of the babes saves them from a really cool rubber monster and they escape. She is not so lucky (Think the flashback from KissKiss BangBang with the girl vs the bear/boar monster, except we never see her death). This rubber monster is the better of the two directly visible monster effects in the movie.

Seriously, this thing was really well-made and super articulated!

Through a series of wacky adventures, the brothers eventually wind up talking to the man whose grave they pillage, except now he's in a child's body. And he's apparently banging a bunch of babes who are also once-dead souls in dead-sexy meat suits. Somehow, it's okay to use someone else's body for sex when they can't consent, but it's not okay to end the world. This movie has some weird, sometimes unsettling logic. Then again, it was the late 90's, early 00's. It was all weird.

The undead kid has one of the best, if most uncomfortable lines of the movie, though:

"Show me a logical madman and I'll show you a condom that fits a twelve-year-old."

And with that, we're moving on.

The brothers eventually have to go "cleanse their souls" by going to confession. They confess pretty much every sin in the book and leave the priest shaken.

But wait!

Where's Tiny Lister?!

Ah, Tiny Lister is the best goddamn character in this movie. He's playing the hacker friend that the brothers use to get information. Except they haven't paid him in a long time, and Suspenders Bro offended him by refuting Tiny's claim that he has the Perfect Penis.

That phrase right there?

That's a major plot point later on.

Tiny Lister's Perfect Penis is a major goddamn plot point.

I don't even know any more, guys.

And that was in the scene between the grave robbing and the sex party.

When Tiny shows up again, he gets kidnapped by the awesome rubber monster and we only see him again towards the end.

At one point, the boys are in a library and are spoken to by Robert Davi who, spoilers, is an angel. The box describes him as a fallen angel, but that's never referenced at any point. Ever. Also, he's one-shot killed by Magus in his "purest" form.

Magus is pretty ticked off by the fact that the brothers are now as pure as the driven snow, so he sends Tiny, who is now a soulless puppet of the big bad, to go collect someone who won't be missed.

What followed was one of the least cruel or crude portrayals of prostitution in general and male prostitution specifically I have ever seen on film. It's seriously the best-handled part of this movie. The prostitutes are portrayed as people who are doing a job. This is their job, and they may not like it, but it's a means of survival and they're good at it. And they're not portrayed as useless, stupid, evil, or worthless.

In fact, the male prostitute who Tiny abducts?

He's the only other person to survive the movie.

And he's the most useful source of information in the entire film.

He's treated as just some guy in a mesh shirt who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And it's beautiful.

So of course there are no pictures of this.

Basically, what happens is that the brothers follow Tiny back to a mansion (it's always a mansion or a castle, isn't it?) where they try to steal back the stone. One of the brothers grabs the rock, but he swears as he's trying to escape, so he's captured. The other brother, who has just rescued male escort bro from the creepy basement of despair, tries to save Suspenders from being Magus's new meat suit.

He needn't have bothered, because Suspenders has an "exceptionally strong soul". Davi appears to help the boys try to escape from cool rubber monster, which he kills, but it's too late!

Tiny absorbs Simon Magus's soul and becomes... well..

Why is he a T-Rex with a dumb belly button in the center of his chest?

The Purest Form of Simon Magus is not very intimidating. Suspenders is nearly killed, but Black Jacket Bro saves him at the cost of his own life.

Pretend this better shot of Magus is relevant.

In the end, Suspenders grabs the rock and chucks it in a garbage disposal at the bar he and his brother were in for about 40% of this movie. Black Jacket is 100% dead, since he literally exploded. Flash forward a while and Suspenders is in a gas station where the clerk is grabbing a gun when he sees him for no reason. Whatever. The interesting part is that Black Jacket bro has somehow guided the PERFECT WOMAN (TM) to Suspenders, and, through the most nauseating and bullshit and contrived scene, they go off together into the sunset.

Overall, I loved this movie. It had great rubber monsters, stupid humor, bad acting, and really good actors in really dumb rolls. Also it had titties.

If you want to watch something that's shot like a cross between Tremors and The Scooby Doo movie with Freddie Prinze Jr, but has the suiting-up-montages of Supernatural, and the actors of a Much Better movie, then this is absolutely the film for you.

11/10, would watch again, highly recommended.

That's all from me, folks.

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