It’s never a good sign when a movie opens up with a dog being put to sleep, but that’s how writer-director Stanley Jacobs decides to open 96 Souls, a hokey low budget sci-fi drama. There is a narrative purpose behind this opening scene, yet it’s still an off-putting way to start a movie. After saying goodbye to his beloved pet, Dr. Jack Sutree (Grinnell Morris) returns to his research in attempting to devise a way to make smells visible, which he believes will have various applications in treating diseases. However, after experimenting on himself, Dr. Sutree will find that much more than odors have become visible to his eyes, something that defies all reason and logic.
96 Souls never finds a rhythm to its absurd premise that is played with a straight face. That’s simply because Jacobs can’t find any drama in the story and saddles it with a number of pointless subplots that bloat the film’s running time. Dr. Sutree isn’t just experimenting and testing his discovery on himself with the help of his trusty friend and colleague Ram (Sid Veda), he’s also in the middle of marital troubles, caring for his older mother, testifying in an upcoming legal dispute, worrying about the funding for his research, and taking a liking to a young homeless woman, Bazemint Tape (Toyin Moses). And yet with all these factors swirling around its story, 96 Souls can’t find any real stakes for its lead character as the film bounces between all these subplots.
It’s difficult to follow all the varying subplots of 96 Souls because so much of the film’s time is spent on deadening expository dialogue, explaining and repeating the minutiae of Dr. Sutree’s discovery. There’s an earnest approach to the film’s outlandish story but Stanley Jacobs has no feel for pacing or dramatic tension, so the whole of the film feels like a bunch of loosely cobbled together story threads that don’t add up.
Worst of all, the character of Bazemint Tape is about as regressive as you could get. It’s easy to overlook the attempts to make the character hip with ridiculous uses of slang, but it’s harder to forgive the fact that the character is a homeless and uneducated musician in the worst way possible. In what is meant to be a humorous inflection, the character refers to algorithms as “Al Gore rhythms.” It’s made all the worse when she finds her long lost mother and proclaims, “I just knows it’s her!” There are few characters in modern cinema as misguided as Bazemint Tape.
For a low budget feature, 96 Souls is well-shot with no jarring edits that seem wildly out of place. But there’s just no momentum to its story to propel these characters forward and the lacking tension really takes its toll over the film’s two hours. There are ample good intentions throughout 96 Souls, but that gets sapped up by the woeful character of Bazzemint Tape. It’s never a good sign when putting a dog to sleep isn’t the worst aspect of a movie.
96 Souls
- Overall Score
Summary
A cheesy sci-fi drama, 96 Souls doesn’t have much forward momentum to its story with numerous subplots of little importance and one of the most unfortunate characters in recent memory.