SOLE SURVIVOR
Not rewarding enough to justify its pace

  It is with a strange mixture of apprehension and anticipation that I check out a movie like this.  What I mean by "like this" is a movie that I've been curious about for the majority of my lifetime.  Ever since I saw print ads for this - and a lot of other horror movies - in the paper as a kid, I've been curious; that's what originally got me curious about horror, really.  So you can see why I'd be eager to see such a film.  Unfortunately, most of the movies that piqued my curiosity at that age ultimately turned out to be crap when I finally saw them.  Hence, the apprehension.

I took this one out of the sci-fi section; the cover art suggests more sci-fi content than is actually in the film.  Anita Skinner stars as a TV producer who is the sole survivor of a plane crash (if the dream sequence in which we see the aftermath of this crash is meant to be taken as a literal flashback, it was quite the flukey escape from death).  She is warned by her doctor (just before she starts dating him) that people in this situation tend to feel unworthy of survival. (we later find out that a large percentage of them kill themselves within two years)  And then she sees these creepy, pale people who keep popping up wherever she goes...

Sole Survivor is a VERY slowly-paced movie, not helped by the fact that it takes our heroine just about forever to figure out that these people are not would-be robbers and stalkers.

Some of the dialogue is pretty ridiculous - like when one woman comments "the karma's so thick around her, you could cut it with a butter knife!" Overused metaphor aside, karma can be good or bad, but this is the first time I've ever heard a reference to its thickness.

What does work for this movie is a stark, hopeless, eerie tone throughout the film.  Though there are no hints dropped as to how it will end, you just know that our heroine isn't going to be ending her screen time with a smile on her face.

A good effort with a much stronger attempt at mood and atmosphere than most anybody would put in, I'm just not really on board here, turned off by a pace too slow, without enough payoff until the final minutes.

Written and directed by Thom Eberhart, who went on to mostly do mid-lowbrow comedies like Gross Anatomy and Captain Ron.

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