I have 491 movies in my Netflix Instant queue. I tend to watch one thing for every five that I add, but now my library is close to being full and I have to make room. So, every Monday I’m going to pick a random movie out of my queue and review the shit out of it. But (like Jesus), I’m also thinking of you and your unwieldy queue and all the movies in it you want to watch but no longer have the time to now that you’ve become so awesome and popular. Let me know what has been gathering digital dust in your Netflix Instant library and I’ll watch that, too. One Monday for you and the next for me and so on. Let’s get to it.
What’s the movie? Nine Dead (2010)
What’s it rated? R for constantly swearing characters, a couple of exploding squibs and Melissa Joan Hart’s crooked mouth.
Did people make it? Written by Patrick Wehe Mahoney. Directed by Chris Shadley. Acted by Melissa Joan Hart, William Lee Scott, James Victor, Chip Bent, Edrick Browne, Marc Macaulay, Lawrence Turner, John Cates, Lucille Soong, John Terry and Daniel Baldwin.
What’s it like in one sentence? PAJohnDoe78 put it best:”It’s almost like a stage play version of the B-plot of Saw 5.”
Why did you watch it? Again, “It’s almost like a stage play version of the B-plot of Saw 5.”
What’s it about in one paragraph? Nine people are doing their thing when they get tazed unconscious by a masked man in a hoodie and camo pants. They wake up chained to poles in a warehouse and the masked man explains that they all have to figure out why they are there, or every ten minutes he will kill one of them, but if they figure it out, then he’ll free whoever is still alive. The rest of the movie is the hostages arguing for 7 minutes and working together for three, with intermittent bursts of the bad guy coming in and shooting someone.
I just always assume the guilty party is the elderly Asian or the Priest. Racist?
Play or remove from my queue? I honestly would have told you to play it if it wasn’t for the ending, which is one of the worst in cinematic history. It’s equally as horrible as the ending to The Devil Inside (which basically turned the movie into a 90 minute ad for The Devil Inside website). Nine Dead actually has a couple of decent performances on top of a handful that are so bad you get to howl at the screen, and the final explanation is just convoluted enough to make you smile instead of slap yourself in the back of the head. It doesn’t try and twist and double twist so much that it becomes a giant mess, in fact, the final explanation for everything is something that all the surviving characters slowly figure out themselves correctly, with no final twist thrown in for shock value. This movie doesn’t deserve a reprieve until next week for me to discuss the spoilers, so I’m going to discuss them now.
Here’s the nine victims:
Christian (John Cates): A pretty boy ex-con who’s now an actor and bartender.
Jackson (William Lee Scott): A cop.
Father Francis (Marc Macauley): A Catholic priest.
Leon (Edrick Browne): A robber and firearm dealer.
Chan (Lucille Soong): A Chinese convenience store owner.
Sully (Chip Bent) A mobster and loan shark.
Coogan (Lawrence Turner) A child molester and killer.
Kelley (Melissa Joan Hart) A lawyer.
Eddie (James Victor) A health insurance executive.
So here’s the explanation: The kidnapper ( John Terry-AKA Christian Shepard on Lost) has taken everyone because of his son, Wade Greeley, who was wrongfully sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. A few years earlier Christian (bartender, not Shepard) borrowed $5,000 from Sully in order to buy some drugs and sell them. He ended up selling them to undercover cops and going to jail. When he got out of prison, he was afraid Sully would kill him if he didn’t pay back the money, so he bought a gun from Leon and robbed a liquor store owned by Mrs. Chan. Mrs. Chan mistakenly identified Wade Greeley as the robber, but also managed to get a fistful of Christian’s hair during the robbery. Kelley is the lawyer trying to put Wade Greeley away for the robbery, but when she finds out the hair samples doesn’t match and fearing for her career, she takes a sample of Wade’s hair and gives it to her cop boyfriend, Jackson, to plant in the evidence locker. Wade goes to prison, where he is raped by Coogan and given AIDS and, when he is finally released, he is turned down for an AIDS treatment trial by Eddie and dies. Oh, and the Priest is there because he heard Christian’s confession and knew that Wade didn’t commit the robbery, but because of his non-disclosure agreement with God, he said nothing.
So, by the end, everyone is dead except the cop, the lawyer and the health insurance guy. They figure everything out and John Terry uncuffs them and says they’re free to go, but the lawyer doesn’t want to lose her job and freedom because she admitted to planting evidence, so she grabs the gun and kills John Terry, the cop and the insurance guy. Right before she kills John Terry, he tells her that everything was videotaped and that the cops are already in the building. She kills them anyway and takes off, not running, but walking at a brisk pace. She turns down a corridor and goes around the corner right before the cops come into the room and enter the corridor…and then it ends. It’s not a moment of “oh, is she going to get away?” it’s more like “oh, she is walking away and the cops are walking in a similar direction.” It’s truly as if they ran out of money and that’s all the footage they had.
If you can think of a worse ending I’d love to hear it, because this one retroactively made the rest of the movie a shit covered pile of also shit. Oh yeah, Daniel Baldwin is in one scene, gets maced and disappears for the rest of the movie. Was he supposed to be a part of the real ending that never got shot? Don’t watch this movie. It’s intriguing and fun for quite a while, but squanders all of it’s goodwill in a moment that actually leaves you wondering if your streaming got fucked up.
This guy looked really familiar to me, but I IMDB'd him and realized I haven't seen anything else he's done. I think I now have to assume he's stalking me.
Do you have a favorite line? Everything out of the mouth of the child molester is so mustache twirlingly evil, you have to hear it to believe it.
Do you have an interesting fun-fact? There’s a moment in the film where a character yells “We’ve got to think of something” and then it cuts to a car driving by an industrial building for a brief second, and then cuts back to that character yelling “I just thought of something!”. That’s fun, isn’t it?
What does Netflix say I’d like if I like this? Exam (been in my queue forever. Looking forward to it), Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade (the short film that got Billy Bob Thornton the funding to make Sling Blade), Wrecked (I don’t wanna watch Adrien Brody bleed out in a car for 2 hours), Stoic (Edward Furlong directed by Uwe Boll might make my head shit) and The Disappearance of Alice Creed (looks good, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.)
What does Jared say I’d like if I like this? The Saw films. Also, any movie that has an intriguing premise, only to shit the bed in the final minutes.
What is Netflix’s best guess for Jared? 2.2
What is Jared’s best guess for Jared? 1.2
Can you link to the movie? I guess so.
Any last thoughts? Don’t start making a movie if you don’t have the funding to finish it or if your script has white-out spilled on the last three pages.
Did you watch anything else this week? Chronicle (flawed, but awesome) and the re-quel of The Thing (pretty cool). I mostly just read books.
Any spoilerish thoughts about last week’s film, Dylan Dog? We watched nothing last week. This is not the pile of shit you are looking for.
Next Week? Fire and Ice or Amigo?
My version of Nine Dead. But real.