Nine Miles Down (2009)

Well I don't know why others have panned this excellent flick. I went through it without once having the desire to fast-forward. Watched every bit of it and enjoyed it very much. I don't know, maybe you have to be a psychologist and a phenomenologist to dig this movie but I found it very gripping and a rather neat look at paranoid ideation. A man suffering from intense guilt because his wife went mad and murdered her children and then killed herself, becomes exposed to a toxic environment and himself goes mad with tragic results. I look upon the hallucinatory segments as metaphor in so far as it is difficult to describe paranoid ideation in a compact manner. If this were a real "case" we would spend weeks or even months unravelling this man's behavior to learn what complex thoughts he was having when he went insane. The film context allows us to compress this analysis to a series of visual allusions. It worked for me. Clearly not for others.

It's one of those movies that had potential but somehow does not really uses it.The storyline is your typical ingredients for a good psychological thriller/horror movie that constantly has you and the viewer questioning their mind. A man is sent to a deserted drill site in the Sahara desert, where a series of unexplained deaths have taken place. As soon as he arrives, a mysterious woman appears who claims to be the survivor of the scientific team, but who is she really ?Already at the start the movie just rushes by without letting the atmosphere really do its' work. And as soon as the storyline really gets off, the film deteriorates into one big confusing mess. It just uses the same old "hallucinations within an hallucination within an hallucinations etc." formula over and over again ad tedium. The female character barely adds anything to the storyline, she's just eye candy and the ending still doesn't explain anything about her.Shame, because the movie did have some potential. Oh well, still better than Rob Zombie I guess.

I guess I wasn't expecting too much - Mr Paul is a fairly average actor who has been lucky to land a long running series, and I hadn't heard of the female lead at all. So not high expectations I guess. But I was pleasantly surprised. There was a decent plot line, the acting wasn't awful and the special effects were, if not blockbuster, were certainly fine. The tightness of the set made for a taut thriller which relied heavily on the acting chops of the two principals. It was definitely one of these films where you were waiting for the next twist to come along, and like the male lead, you have a niggling feeling that it's not finished yet. With a bigger budget and a couple of named stars, this would have been right up there with the best films of the year. It needed a slightly more defined end and stronger performances, as well as some steadier camera work to build menace rather than spinning round to show confusion, but apart from that really not a bad film at all. Begging for a remake.

There's really not many directions you can go with this type of movie. Anybody whose seen the pathetic attempts to reboot The Exorcist (i.e. Exorcist: The Beginning) has seen this premise. I'm not really sure it was a great idea to begin with, and beating it to death isn't helping. Still, this movie's got some going for it. Most of the horror is based on jumpy, sudden moves of creepy imagery. Yes, that's a bit cheap but that doesn't make it less effective. The actors do fine. Not outstanding, but they get the job done.The story is pretty basic. Security officer Brit McStudly and scientist Dr. Hotpants (ok, not their real names but they were clearly chosen for their looks rather than talent) get stuck in the middle of nowhere in a research/drilling station where things have apparently gotten very real. So the two of them hang out there and one of them may or may not be under assault by demons. There's some vague connections to religious angles and a good deal of psychological tension. Again, decent...but not great.Would I recommend it? Sure, if you've got nothing better to do. It's not stellar but it's far from the worst thing you've ever seen (then again this is IMDb so I'm sure at least one person will claim it is...and that person will be an idiot).