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Carnival of Souls (1998)

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74 comments in total

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9 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Save your soul from this!, 25 March 2002

Author: Billston from U.S of A

A movie couldn't have gotten worse than this. It was boring and very very dumb. It had a lot of potential but it all went down the drain. The ending was also very stupid. The movie was hard to understand. Skip it. I saw it on TV and I wish I could have been surfing the net for those two hours.

Rating: 0/10

Note: After viewing this movie it will make you want to vomit.

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7 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
A complete waste of time..., 11 June 2001

Author: jerlenbu from South Dakota

This is perhaps the worst movie I have seen in my entire life, and I have seen some really bad films. This movie was extremely boring, had zero plot, and no decent acting to speak of. The limited special effects are nothing noteworthy, either. I had a hard time staying awake, and when it was over, I wished I had fallen asleep instead of subjecting myself to such torture. I can't believe that Wes Craven would put his name on such a dismal failure. If you were thinking of watching this film, don't waste your time or money. Rent something better, such as the original Carnival of Souls (1962).

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8 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
A pale imitation of the original..., 23 July 2001
Author: mizuno68 (rwd627@netzero.net) from Tampa, FL

Spare yourself and see Herk Harvey's original film. The director's cut is particularly good. This movie loses the ideas of the original, and I'm sorry, but Larry Miller is not menacing. I'm not sure whose idea it was to try to 'reimagine' this movie, but it certainly doesn't work on any level. If I hadn't seen the original, I would have been very confused by what they were trying to say with this one.

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5 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
This movie was about as coherent as reading the pages of a Choose Your Own Adventure in numerical order..., 16 January 2001
Author: i_patton (i_patton@hotmail.com) from Ottawa, Canada

This movie jumped around so much, my stomach felt like a lotto tumbler. I can't believe they made this traipse! I couldn't make any sense of what was going on. It would just go from one scene, then reveal that to be a delusion, only to go to another scene, which was a delusion, then return to the first. Multiply that by about ten times and that's how confusing the movie got. And, to boot, nothing happened! What a rip!

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9 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
GODAWFUL, 4 April 1999
Author: Mike Shields (kingbman@aol.com) from Hayward, CA

Oh well, It was bound to happen. I finally saw the remake of Carnival of Souls. Was it worth it? In a word, NO! Forget the original set up about the lone survivor (Candace Hilligross) of an automobile accident, moving to a small town, and seeing visions of ghoulish people from the other side coming for her. This time around, A young woman (Bobbie Phillips), a victim of sexual abuse by a pedophile clown (comic Larry Miller) when she was younger, encounters the clown years later. He forces her to drive to the river and she deliberately crashes her car into the river.......you know the rest.

This movie is so terrible. It plays like a dirty USA made for TV movies of the week. The acting is similar to anything you would encounter while watching Melrose Place, etc. Wait til you get a load of what the people from the other side look like this time around. Whooo-boy. No expense was spared for the make up effects for these creatures.

I can just imagine the congratulatory slap on the backs the film makers received from each other. These bums probably think the remake of Psycho was better than the original. I think the audience for this movie is for those who think Urban legend, I Know What You Did This and Last Summer, etc. are great classics. I hope those "12 year old of all ages" enjoy the film. I sure as Hell didn't

I read a few months back, that Candace Hilligross was supposed to have a hand with the remake, but those around the making of the film back stabbed her off the production. I hope she has the last laugh when she sees the critical raspberries this film will rightfully receive.

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12 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
Oh no it's got "Wes Craven presents" in the title :(, 6 February 1999

Author: tamp from Wakefield, England

The pits! God knows why Wes Craven insists on slapping his name on the front of drivel like this, it's only going to ruin his reputation.

I've not seen the first film that this was based on so I can't compare them.(please someone do the honors & tear this film to pieces)

Far too many prolonged dream sequences got me reaching for the fast forward button, characters you don't really care about, gorehounds will hate it & a naff ending just about sums this film up. one out of ten.

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
A pale imitation of the original..., 23 July 2001
Author: mizuno68 (rwd627@netzero.net) from Tampa, FL

Spare yourself and see Herk Harvey's original film. The director's cut is particularly good. This movie loses the ideas of the original, and I'm sorry, but Larry Miller is not menacing. I'm not sure whose idea it was to try to 'reimagine' this movie, but it certainly doesn't work on any level. If I hadn't seen the original, I would have been very confused by what they were trying to say with this one.

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
The Worst Movie I Have Ever Seen, 28 November 1999

Author: lhgreard from Antibes, France

there aren't many movies that are so bad you can not even have fun watching them and laughing at obvious mistakes or bad taste. This movie is way beyond the Ed Wood kind of bad movie. I mean I would rather spend two hours watching the summer family vacation video of someone I don't know that having to endure this again.

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3 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Horror or Drama?, 6 July 2000

Author: SwatchDog (swatchdog@dork.com) from Sydney, Australia

Carnival of Souls starts off promising, but goes downhill awfully too soon. Yes, we know Alex is haunted by memories of her mother's death and lives in fear that the killer is coming after her, but will you get on with the film already?

I really wanted to like this film, but there were too many lost plots, irrelevant characters and it's slow pacing. I really wanted to like it. It would've made an excellent drama, but they ruined it by marketing it as a horror film and by placing these weird chernobyl freak things in Alex's nightmares. Total disappointment.

Shawnee Smith was very charismatic and delightful as the younger sister. Bobbie Phillips (who looks like a cross between Claire Forlani & Natalie Imbruglia) was excellent and quite touching at times. Larry Miller, who really only appears in dreams, etc.. was funny as the perverted psycho, but lacked development.

Carnival of Souls was well acted & directed but lacked in the writing department. The only horror was in the dreams, and films in this genre need more than that.

5/10

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3 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
BEYOND SIMPLY BAD, 4 June 2000

Author: mjshannon from LaGrange, Illinois

Worthless time waster that has a central character whose predicament is so obvious from the get go that what follows can only be described as interminable! Add to the mix a horrible script,ham fisted direction and some of the most inane and ludicrous dialogue ever put to film and you have one of the worst remakes ever made--make that one of the worst movies ever made,as this has little to do with the original!! See the brilliant original instead of this abomination. Executive producer Wes Craven has done much to destroy the horror movie genre and this is his piece de resistance. Again, this is totally worthless and completely absurd!

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