Optimistically initially promoted as “Peter’s Friends meets The Others“, it was not asking too much to expect Nine Lives to at least be a serviceable, old fashioned ghost story. Instead, it’s a badly acted tale of a group of deeply unlikeable 20-somethings being possessed by a vengeful spirit in a bog-standard slasher movie setting.
The first 20-odd minutes are tedious in the extreme as director Andrew Green explores what he presumably thought were deeply fascinating characters but who are really badly drawn, irritating and pompous, lacking any positive qualities that the film’s target audience is likely to identify with. This drags on for what seems an eternity and even when the killings do begin, we still don’t like these appalling caricatures (mostly posh kids, a couple of token working class types and the awful Paris Hilton pretty much playing herself, and still doing a terrible job of it) enough to care what happens to them.
The performances are uniformly dreadful – it comes to something when even Hilton’s usual one-note performance doesn’t stand out as being particularly bad. Stiff, unconvincing and not a little self-conscious, it’s clear that the majority of the cast were making their debuts here and that the rest had had very little experience at this stage. There’s not a single convincing turn in the entire sorry cast.
Mind you, they’re not at all helped by the terrible script, written by director Andrew Green with additional dialogue by Tom MacRae, creator of Sky One’s Mile High (2003-2005) and Channel 4’s As If (2001-2004) and writer of the Doctor Who episodes Rise of the Cybermen (2006) and The Age of Steel (2006). Brimming over with rubbish dialogue and improbable character motivations, even a cast of seasoned veterans would struggle to bring this nonsense to life. It’s main problem is that it really doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be – it begins as a tedious character piece, transforms into a demonic possession movie then gives up and becomes just another slasher movie, resplendent with all the genre’s many clichés. Except, strangely, the sex. What self-respecting slasher could ever get by without even a flash of gratuitous nudity?
To be fair to Green, he does what he can with his own hopeless writing and pulls off a few decent scares. The suspense scenes are reasonably well done (but think how much better they would have been if we’d actually cared about what might happen to the characters) though rather defused by the curious decision to place a scene from near the end of the film just before the credits, then tell the rest of the story in flashback – so we know at least one potential victim isn’t going to die any time soon so tend to relax whenever she seems to be in danger.
Production wise, the film looks fine. It’s clear that Green and company got themselves a reasonable budget and a decent crew – director of photography Robin Vidgeon, who does at least give the film a professional sheen, had previously photographed Hellraiser (1987), The Fly II (1989) and Nightbreed (1990) among others – which helps raise the film considerably above the level of all of those terrible shot-on-video efforts that sometimes seems to make up the bulk of post-Millennial British horror.
The biggest problem with Nine Lives is that it’s all so predictable. Green can think of absolutely nothing new to add to an already stale genre, relying instead on tried and trusted clichés that were worn out at least a decade earlier. Dull people creep around dull corridors, synthesized strings blare on the soundtrack, some people get stabbed and eventually there’s a single female survivor left to fend off the unwanted attentions of the killer. How many films can you think off that fit that bill? And just adding a supernatural “twist” to the killer doesn’t qualify as originality I’m afraid.
Nine Lives formed part of a mini-theme in post-Millennium British horror involving body-hopping murderous spirits, others including Long Time Dead (2002) and Ghost Rig (2001). Nine Lives isn’t the worst of them – it’s too well made for that – but they’re a pretty sorry bunch all round and there’s not much to choose between them.
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