Session 9 (2001)

reviewed by
Susan Granger


Susan Granger's review of "SESSION 9" (USA Films)

Sometimes you just get more than your bargained for...like when Boston-based Hazmat Elimination, run by Scottish actor Peter Mullan and his trusty assistant, David Caruso, assures a town engineer (Paul Guilifoyle) that they can remove insidious asbestos fibers from a Victorian hospital facility in a week. Erected in 1871, deserted and decomposing since 1985, the Danvers Mental Hospital, is one of the most malevolent "locations" ever chosen for a film. The structure is so massive - with its labyrinth of rubble-strewn corridors, collapsing floors, stagnant pools of water, isolation cells, and ominous surgical chambers where experimental pre-frontal lobotomies were performed - that their task seems impossible within that time frame. And each member of their inexperienced crew (Stephan Gevedon, Brandon Sexton III, and Josh Lucas) is coping with his own personal demons as, one by one, their minds seem to be affected by the grim areas in which they're working. The film's title is derived from salvaged reel-to-reel audio-recorded sessions involving the demonic possession of a young woman who is suffering from multiple personalities. By the time Session 9 occurs so do dreadful disasters.

Filmmaker Brad Anderson obviously envisioned this as a gruesome chainsaw-massacre-type ghost story but the script lacks structure and isn't particularly scary. The conclusion is more ludicrous than convincing. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Session 9" is a dark, gloomy 4. Silly me...at first, I thought that the original name of the Danvers Lunatic Asylum bore some reference to Mrs. Danvers, the creepy housekeeper played by Judith Anderson in Alfred Hitchcock's truly terrifying "Rebecca" that also involved a cavernous mansion called Manderley.

==========
X-RAMR-ID: 29187
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 243888
X-RT-TitleID: 1108254
X-RT-SourceID: 742
X-RT-AuthorID: 1274
X-RT-RatingText: 4/10

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews