"Soul Survivors" is almost a scene-for-scene rewrite of Bruce Joel Rubin's script for "Jacob's Ladder;" the genders are reversed, and the cast is a decade or so younger, but the story is essentially the same -- right down to the, um, angelic caregiver (Luke Wilson) to whom Mellissa Sagemiller's tortured heroine turns as she tries to make sense of her weird hallucinations after surviving a horrific car crash, and right down to the departed love one (Casey Affleck) who turns up at convenient intervalls to help her along the way.
Rubin has borrowed the concept himself from Ambrose Bierce's story "An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge," but expanded and updated it considerably, director Steve Carpenter's draft owes far more to Rubin than Bierce, and could almost be considered straight plagiarism if it wasnt for the flashes of images lifted from Henk Harvey's "Carnival of Souls." A better director might have made the material his own, but Carpenter's not even able to sell the most basic scenes Sagemiller's confusion without slipping into incoherance.
The special edition DVD keeps its chin up and piles on the extras, with a trio of deleted scenes, storyboard comparisons, a couple of insubstantial featurettes (what the hell is the Harvey Danger thing, anyway?) and a sporadic commentry track from star Sagemiller, who doesn't really have much to say -- not surprising, really, when one realises this was a crappy little B-Movie she shot about three years ago, before moving onto much more interesting endeavors, like "Get Over It" and "Sorority Boys."
Sadly, the most interesting aspect of the DVD is the elaborate menu structure that allows users to explore the disc in three different themes, reflecting the movies blurred realities. It's a neat idea, although PolyGram did it a few years back for "What Dreams May Come" DVD, allowing the viewer to choose from Heaven or Hell motifs. So, really, there's nothing original about this package at all.
