pfgpowell-1 Review of House of 9

House of 9 (2005)

Complete cobblers - ideal for that night when you are very, very bored

[3/10 · 13 September 2009]

Oh dear. House Of Nine, unfortunately, has Euro TV trash written all over it. The giveaway was, as always, that production companies from several countries have their finger in the pie, and the list of producers leads me to believe that oil money is involved at some point. Or perhaps sons of oil money who are a little bored with buying new cars and fancy turning their hand — that would be Daddy's oil money — to film financing. What with most of the world to sell it to, it will most certainly recoup its productions cost and then some. And most certainly some who see it will think it rather good. But it's not rather good. It's rather bad. I picked this up for £3 at my local Tesco seeing that Dennis Hopper starred in it. Well, he does star in it, but his involvement means only that he must have several pressing bills to pay. Another name which caught my eye was that of Peter Capaldi who does such a splendid turn in In The Thick Of It and its cinema offspring In The Loop. Capaldi, too, must have several pressing bills. Oh, and Kelly Brook can't act, or at least acts no better than most wannabes in a sixth-form production. Hopper's 'oirish accent' slips everywhere from Ulster to Killarney and occasionally even Boston, the mad Frenchman overacts so much he probably thought he was on double wages. Briefly, a disparate group of nine people, chosen at random, are locked in a smallish mansion after being kidnapped in London. None is very nice, except Kelly Brook and 'oirish' Father Michael Duffy (Hopper), and it takes less than 24 hours for the lot of them to crack up. The idea is that they should all kill each other, and the last man or woman left standing wins £5 million. Er, and that's it. No other explanation is given, least of all at the end (and the ending is something of a pseudo-significant cop-out) and along the way there is plenty of blood and mayhem. What there isn't, however, is any real sense of horror, any suspense or any slight reason to care what happens. As I say, Euro TV trash to the end. Having comprehensively dissed it, however, I would not discourage you from seeing it if it turns up on your TV channel one night and you have bugger all else to do. But neither would I encourage you. The thought which finally stays with me is: just what was Dennis Hopper doing getting involved in complete cobblers such as this? The pay cheque must have been worth it.