Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Session 9 (2001)

I'm a bad horror fan, but I just did not like this movie.  I've heard a lot of hype about it, and it looked really promising.  But I just did not get it.

Session 9 is the story of an old mental hospital, which is being refurbished to house some city offices.  However, in order to do so, a bunch of dangerous asbestos has to be removed.  Being a government agency and all, they have to bring in different contractors to review the job and bid on it.

Enter Gordon (Peter Mullan) and his crew.  Gordon is really struggling at home.  His new baby is sick and he and his wife are not getting much rest.  He really needs this job in order to make ends meet, so he makes the guy a ridiculous offer.  They'll finish the job in a week....where other contractors were quoting 3-4 weeks.  His co-workers are none too happy about finishing this job in a hurry, but with a bonus in their sights, they press on.

The mental hospital is definitely a creepy place, and this movie definitely did not fail in the way of ambiance.  As the men go to work, Mike (Stephen Gevedon) a law school dropout, begins to dig around the records, researching the case of Mary Hobbes.  He becomes enthralled by listening to the tapes of her interviews, which exhibit her multiple personalities.  I found these scenes to be seriously freaky, and I thought that the movie would focus on ghost/possession of Mary or somesuch thing, but this definitely went in a totally different direction.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew is doing their own thing.  Phil (David Caruso) is angry at Hank (Josh Lucas) for stealing his longtime girlfriend.  He has taken up smoking pot, and becomes concerned about Gordon's mental condition.  Hank on the other hand, is a compulsive gambler looking for an out from the job and his girlfriend.  He finds this in some hidden treasure in the asylum's walls.  Jeff (Brendan Sexton III) is the youngest of the crew, and is terrified of the dark...therefore he should probably not be working in an old asylum. 

Strange things start happening on the job, beginning with Hank going missing, presumably running off to casino school in Miami.  The generator fails, and the men are left scrambling in the dark, all seeming to be chased by something.  But by who? 

I found this movie to be really slow moving and actually not very scary at all.  I felt like it really kicked off the creepiness with the freaky old building and the chilling multiple personality voices, but then it just never really continued from there.  The ending was seriously weak, and I had to look it up on Wikipedia just to even figure out what happened.  So sorry to all that liked this movie, but I found it to be a fail.

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