It’s raining horror films this season and the 2020 movie ‘Sweet Taste of Souls’ blends in aspects of fantasy films, psychological thrillers and gore fests to offer you a mixed pie.
Directed by Terry Ross and co-written by F. Scott Mudgett, the film follows the story of Ellinore (Honey Lauren), who sells pies in a roadside cafe and likes capturing people with her digital camera… quite literally. She can imprison people into photo frames once she prints their picture out. So you have a cafe with multiple photos of people she has trapped over the years.
The start is very slow and it takes a while for the film to get interesting. Things shake up when four musicians find themselves trapped in her cafe and challenge Ellinore’s wicked hold over them. There is a parallel track of a detective who is close to cracking the cases of those who went missing around Ellinore’s pie shop. The story is quite intriguing, but the execution is sloppy.
Honey Lauren looks the part of the evil antagonist who seemingly suffers from mental health issues, but her acting lacks punch. Her back-story is not convincing enough either. The four musicians Nate (John Salandria), Kyle (Mark Valeriano), Wendy (Amber Gaston), Lily (Sarah J. Bartholomew) come across as a random bunch of unlikable hippies.
Director Terry Ross should have kept things simple towards the climax, because things get a little bizarre and confusing in the end. The movie could have worked well as a horror comedy, with some witty humour thrown in. It’s creepily comical in some bits and just bizarre in others.