p e n g u i n d e v i l

Like they say you have to do hard time to learn hard crime, I guess you have to go into a mental institution to become really insane. Spending a week doing hazmat cleanup in a gigantic old abandoned mental home and something is bound to go terribly wrong with you. And sometimes when wrong things happen, there is no going back, only forward into more and more wrongs.

I’ve always been fascinated by the late, great Danvers mental hospital so, when I heard that they made a movie there, I just had to see it. That movie is Session 9. A little movie about some hazmat guys who head to the abandoned hospital to do the environmental cleanup. Though Session 9 is a good and entertaining horror/suspense film, with a place like Danvers, the building is the real star. The hospital is so rundown and creepy that you almost just need to push a camera around to make a horror movie

Featuring a cast of unknowns, Matt from Pecker and David Caruso, who I’ve always loathed (especially in his terrible current role on CSI) but who doesn’t really bother me in this one. The antics of the cast are rather secondary (well, until things really start to go wrong) but the plot is good and some of the characters can grow on you, though they are all kind of jerkies. Luckily, they do more than just push a camera around the dark, puddled hallways. They add a good level of human trauma, paranoia, jealousy and conflict to keep the story going. This is another one of those where you know that something is starting to go terribly wrong, but you don’t know the what or the who of it and it just seems that opening that box of tapes in the basement was a bad idea. Anyway, so these guys go into Danvers to clean it up and while fussing around in the basement, one of them finds a box of tapes labeled “evidence” and, of course, opens it up and starts listening to them. The tapes are the recordings of therapy sessions between a psychiatrist, a teenage girl and her three other personalities… These tapes form the backdrop of the movie and add an unpleasing tone to the emergence of something wrong and the rapid disintegration of the entire situation.

In addition to these unsettling tapes being played, they throw in: more creepy voices, unreliable power, the requisite wheelchair in the hallway, puddles and drips, basements at night, splitting the party up, multiple eyeball pokes, some insanity, some carnage, some betrayal (very violent and insane betrayal) and lots of great shots of the Hospital. Including a number of creepy spaces, and you can’t help but wonder how much of it was the actual condition of the hospital when they went in there.

Oh yeah, and there are some deaths, too…

All in all, I thought it was pretty good. The lead character is very well played and you can’t help but feel his desperation, the mystery is well presented and the movie is creepy and actually gets pretty tense towards the end.

Also, in case anyones excitement has waned from the landmark a month and a half ago of PD post #200, I believe that this is “Movie viewing #400” on this blog. So there, is that worthy of a beer? I still wish I would have started earlier, as 2003 was really my favorite (and most excessive) movie watching year.