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Gordon's (Peter Mullan) asbestos removal company is hired to fix up a
former insane asylum that has been closed down 15 years ago, but oddly
enough its patients tended to come back after the closure ...
For the removal job, Gordon has scheduled only one week, especially to
get the job & the bonus ($ 10.000), although even his
second-in-command Phil (David Caruso) doubts they can do it.
The team of workers Gordon brings seems hardly fit for the job, there's
his nephew Jeff (Brendan Sexton III), who is completely new to asbestos
removal & furthermore has a fear of the dark, there's Mike (Stephen
Gevedon), a failed law student who soon shows more interest in some case
histories he finds in the building than his actual work, there's Hank
(Josh Lucas), who has stolen Phil's wife, there's Phil who not only hates
Hank's guts for that, but he also doubts each & every decision Gordon
makes & wants him off his own company ... & then there's Gordon,
who looks more & more like a wreck, & who seems to have domestic
problems (at one point he tells Phuil he has beaten his wife - accidently,
but still).
After day one, Hank disappears too - allegedly he has gone to Miami,
but Gordon can't shake the feeling that Phil has gotten rid of him
one way or the other - & Gordon even gets more 6 more direct in
expressing his suspicions.
Al the while, the place gets more & more creepy, until one day,
Hank appears to Jeff, but he seems to be totally out of it, & covered
in blood. When Jeff wants to show the others though, Jeff is gone, but
footsteps from somewhere above suggest that there's really someone there,
but when the team tries to hunt whoever-it-is down, it results only in a
ll of them panicking ...
The next morning, Gordon finds Phil leaning over Hank's corpse, puts 2
and 2 together, & is now sure about what he had always suspected, that
Phil indeed did kill Hank. Phil then calmly tries to persuade Gordon to
hush it up & finish their job, but ...
... but in fact, Phil is not even around, Gordon is just daydreaming
(or sleepwalking), & he in fact really did kill Hank himself, &
now proceeds to kill all his other workers, who arrive at the scene one
after the other. Then he calls his wife & asks for forgiveness ...
only, he did not only hit his wife, he actually killed both ehr & his
baby daughter, & since lives in denial.
... & in fact, he once was a patient of the asylum himself, &
his session was recorded on one of the tapes Mike has been listening to,
called Session 9.
A psycho horror movie that boldly doesn't follow the usual formula of
brainless teens being slaughtred, instead tries to flesh out its
characters & establish more-dimensional character relations -
unfortunately this virtue of the film is at the same time its downfall::
The film spends way more time on developing its main characters (mainly
Phil & Gordon though) than actually tell its story, which then shows
quite a few plotholes - e.g. how come Jeff sees Hank still alive when
Gordon has already killed him days earlier, what does the whole plot of
the film actually have to do witht he taped sessions & the fat that
Mike is a former law student, & why couldn'T the revelation that
Gordon is indeed the killer have come a little subtler since everything
was pointing into this direction right from the start (including the fact
that he has killed his wife & daughter) ?
After having said all that, I have to admit the film is not quite as
bad as my comments have made it to be, at least it tries to nogt insult
the intelligence of the audience (as many modern horror films tend to), it
just could have been much better.
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