JoeyBro

An incoherent mess with a gratingly deafening sound track, "Soul Survivors" is the latest entry in the "who's dead and who's alive" genre of horror films. Two teenaged couples, Sean and Cassie and Matt and Annabel, prepare to go off to different colleges, but before they part until Thanksgiving Break, they attend one last fling at a rave-type party in some burnt-out church at the suggestion of lusciously slutty Annabel (Eliza Dushku, a.k.a. Faith, the other vampire slayer). Motiveless creepy guys start paying far too much attention to Cassie (the generic Melissa Sagemiller) for reasons that are never explained, and before long, the quartet leave the party. Driving away in their SUV, they are pursued and then passed by the motiveless creepy guys, who promptly and inexplicably do an intentional 180 in the middle of the highway, causing a nasty and fatal accident as the SUV flips over an embankment and plunges into a river. Sean is killed (or is he?), and Cassie spends the rest of the movie coping with loneliness and guilt (she was driving) when she's not being haunted by Sean's ghost or chased by those motiveless creepy guys. Much unexplained incoherence follows as Cassie's mental state degenerates further, until we reach the predictable conclusion. So, who is dead and who is alive? After ninety minutes of this purgatory, who actually cares?

In the brilliant 1981 Das Boot, Peterson gave us the stench, claustrophobia, boredom, and terror of a German U-Boat in WW2. In Das Fishing Boot... I mean, The Perfect Storm, Peterson gives us the stench, claustrophobia, boredom, and terror of a fishing boat somewhere on a sound stage that's supposed to be the northern Atlantic. What's missing are any real characters to care about. A collection of men with lame back stories find themselves in contrived situations, performing utterly incredulous feats of derring-do while we wait for them to die. George Clooney manages to climb a 30 to 40 foot metal scaffold one handed, holding a blow torch in the other, while riding 50 foot waves in 100 plus mile an hour winds. Reaching the top, the scaffold drops back to the deck, dangling Clooney over the side of the boat, yet he manages to hang on to both it and his blow torch. Holy Incredulity, Batman! Except for the special effects, The Perfect Storm is a waste of time and can be summed up by an old Saturday Night Live skit where a choir sang... "the ship that went to sea.... sank!"