Canadian-made TV show about a haunted hospital in Boston. Similar to KINGDOM HOSPITAL, in one sense, and X-FILES in another. The generic lead at least has the right look and feel, and the pilot has him as a promising young intern working at All Souls Hospital. Get it? All souls? Our young doctor runs into apparitions and mysterious messages almost from the get-go. He has a mystery to solve involving the disappearance of several patients, and is aided in his quest by your typical Jimmy Olsen-type sidekick, an orderly who seems to be able to access almost any locked office or private file. The special effects aren't bad for a TV show, the gore is minimal, and the action and suspense builds nicely for awhile -- until we get to the big climax involving a Nazi-type doctor (played by one of the worst actors I have ever seen) performing hideous experiments on those missing patients. At this point, everything sort of deflates because, after all, this will be an ongoing TV series and you can't very well play everything out in the first episode. Our hero ends up staying at this cursed hospital rather than heading for Yale, where he really belongs, and goes on to solve various mysteries, usually involving the supernatural to some degree. He is The One, apparently. How do I know? Because the bad guy called him that in the pilot. OK to watch when there's no HOUSE, MD or SCRUBS or even an old X-FILES episode on. And ALL SOULS certainly is better than that wretched Stephen King-penned KINGDOM HOSPITAL.
Review of All Souls
