HOUSE OF 9
"Only the most passionate genre fans will be able to sit through House of 9 and be able to semi-recommend the thing to anybody else."
Scott Weinberg
Turns out I'm a passionate genre fan, because I'm delving into good old shlock here.
I saw this film when it came out and I loved it. You should understand that I have a weakness for anything pretending to be And Then There Were None. And this film takes all of its cues from Christie, from Saw, from numerous other sources. It's entirely unoriginal B-movie stuff.
When I saw it the first time it had the studio enforced "happy" ending, too.
So, Kelly Brook is kidnapped by shadowy people we never see, and it turns out she is one of nine people who have been locked in a house somewhere with no entrance or exit. They will be there until 8 of the 9 are dead, and the "winner" gets 5 million. Days pass with no rescue and the claustrophobic prison and low quality food rations start to cause folk to go a bit nutty. Meanwhile our cop Jay, who immediately started out as our wise leader, and Fr Duffy the Irish priest, both try to calm things. Because it's psychological, and surely if they don't give into the rules of the game, their captors will give up?
But then on the third day there's a party, with a booze cupboard suddenly unlocked, and a fight. One character goes to stop the fight only to be knocked back, their head hitting a solid staircase. Dead.
It's now a House of 8, and the countdown has started...
Fr Duffy, incidentally, is played by Dennis Hopper. Yes. Dennis Hopper. He's going to show up in your low budget horror film, and he is going to smash it like it was an Oscar nominated role. His accent is varied to say the least, but he adds weight and sympathy to the role, and thus film. He's aided on this part by the man playing corrupt executive Max, once a famous face, now long past his 15 minutes of fame, who is quite keen to play everyone against the other, and who isn't beyond a bit of helping the body count rise if it means saving his own skin.
For Max is played by Peter fn Capaldi.
Yes, this derivative low budget mess has two of the finest actors we ever saw sharing scenes together.
The rest of the cast include Kelly Brook (the model), Hippolyte Giradot (the acclaimed French actor, in a rare non-French film!), Morven Christie (Grantchester), and Susie Amy, the latter of who's Wikipedia page ranks this film as equal to her regular roles in Footballer's Wives and Hollyoaks.
But while, yes, the acting is variable in its quality (you can guess from who by the cast list), removing the whodunnit aspect of ATTWN accidentally creates quite an intriguing set up. By making the premise Will They Do It, and having folk adamant they cannot take a life, the production manages to build on the tension and atmosphere, until the fated party where it all kicks off.
Especially when they are rewarded after that incident with better quality of food!
Dennis Hopper doesn't have a lot to do, but he is the conscience of the film. His faith rapidly descends into an inner hell as the true cost of their imprisonment ruins all he holds dear in humans. Peter Capaldi is incapable of bad performances. Giradot is very good in his role, especially as it starts off unsympathetic (he is in a turmoiled relationship), and slowly falls off the deep end. He somehow manages to make some ludicrous scenes work.
Also, things start to go badly wrong when our leader Jay is brutally bumped off 2nd of all of them!
There are things to dislike. I'd rather the violent housemate wasn't the wannabe black rapper, because that verges far too much into stereotype for my liking.
But when things break down, they break down badly. Even our humanist breaks down when faced by ceaseless inhumanity. Also when characters argue the camera goes proper nuts too.
(This is an actual proper spoiler below btw)
I think my least favourite character is Claire, the former tennis player. Francis is clearly sent over the edge of limited sanity when his wife dies, Ali B is a stereotype. Claire outright kills the asbo girl because she has a chance to kill someone lower on the pecking order and get away with it, and she does. She is the embodiment of the culture which brought Boris Johnson to us a decade later.
And at the end of the day, it's a low budget horror, but its a low budget with Hopper and Capaldi. And thus, considerably better than derivative low budget horrors that lack Hopper and Capaldi. You will see much worse films, and if its not the outright classic I thought it was in 2004, its still a ripping good yarn, and not a waste of 90 minutes.
So, sorry, DVD Talk, Rotten Tomatoes, imdb, you can keep your low scores all you want, I still quite like House of 9, which is, for all its flaws, a highly entertaining horror flick.
And do you know what makes it even better?
This version got rid of the studio happy ending and has the proper one!
For the film now instead asks us what is the price of giving into avarice...
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