Soul Music (1997)

Soul Music (1997)

Directed by: Jean Flynn

Starring: Christopher Lee, Graham Crowden, Andy Hockley

I know IMDb says that this is a TV series, and then claims that it’s in only two parts, but the way I saw it was as a big block of ten or so episodes of a miniseries or something, so it’s close enough to a movie for me.

A guy wants to be a famous musician, and picks up a magic guitar which allows him and his band of a dwarf and a rock troll to invent a style of music called “music with rocks in”, which becomes very popular. This happens because he dies, but “the spirit of music” takes over his body, hence Soul Music. There is also a completely pointless and unconnected story about Death (Lee) wanting to forget about his adopted daughter dying, so his granddaughter takes over as death.

Seriously, that whole half of the thing has nothing at all to do with the story. They try tying it back in a couple times, but if you think about it even the slightest, the actual plot wouldn’t change in the slightest if you just took it all out. In fact, MOST of the completely unnecessary subplots in this movie (of which there are several) are exactly the same way. All they’re there for is an excuse for laboriously set up bad puns.

Which brings me to my next point: Terry Pratchett sucks. Seriously, fuck Terry Pratchett. It’s like he writes for no reason other than to clumsily shoehorn in modern concepts and stupid, unfunny puns into a semi-fantasy setting. It’s so poorly thought out that you just start to feel bad and embarrassed for the guy, until you realize that he’s built an entire career on writing dozens of books full of this exact thing, and then you just get angry. I’m assuming that you are me in this instance, by the way.

Apart from the bad writing and unnecessary hour and a half of this two hour miniseries, it looks like shit. It’s incredibly cheap animation, which reminds one of 80’s Saturday morning cartoons, only not quite up to the same level of quality. Seriously, I saw an episode of Captain Planet on one of these old tapes the other day, and it looked a lot better than Soul Music did. So… if you can somehow make it through the dialog that makes you want to bash your head against a wall and the hours of completely pointless subplots, it’s STILL impossible to watch this pile of shit, if only because it’s so poorly animated and ugly. Why was Christopher Lee in this? Sigh…