Usually I can judge how bad a movie is by the size of my headache after its over. Nine Lives was a movie that reminded me of an old Excedrin commercial where the people in it would proclaim they have a headache "this big" while holding their hands as wide apart as they could get them.

When the movie's main drawing card to try and pull in an audience is having slutty hotel heiress Paris Hilton in the cast, you know you're in trouble. Thankfully she's only in it for the first fifteen minutes or so which is just enough time for you to decide that not only she can't act, but that she can't act her way out of a wet paper bag.

Director-writer Andrew Green has crafted one painful movie, and while I'd love to pass it off on his young age (he looks to be no older than 23 on the DVD interview) or inexperience, I just can't. I won't make excuses for him. His premise itself is so unoriginally bland it's barely worth mentioning, but just for the record this has a group of friends gathering together at an isolated Scottish mansion for a reunion of sorts after they've been too busy with their careers to keep in touch. This leads to plenty of boring dialogue before one of them happens to stumble upon an old book hidden in the wall behind the bookcase. When said book is cracked open it turns out to be the journal of the former owner who's land was taken away by the British before they cut out his eyes and fed them to him. This leads to people beginning to be inexplicably possessed by his spirit, which makes them take on the appearance of having no eyes while they proceed to kill off the other members of the house.

Lacking suspense and suffering from a leisurely build-up that tries in vain to establish the characters (there's way too many people in the house for us to really give two craps about them), this soon turns into a series of brain-dead events as the cast continually has to utter that they "don't know what's going on" (something I thought to myself numerous times as well) while the script doesn't bother to really explain why it's happening and why, after all these years, the spirit would just happen to show-up and possess people. It's sloppy writing like this that stinks up the joint and Green doesn't even use a subplot involving a snowstorm to his advantage.

Nine Lives is a complete waste of horror fan's time, but at least we can have a good groan at dialogue such as "whether we believe in ghosts is irrelevant, he believes in us", and we can loudly guffaw when the one character who's supposed to be a med student can't even patch up a simple knife wound. (Chris Hartley, 11/7/05)

Directed By: Andrew Green.
Written By: Andrew Green.

Starring: David Nicolle, Amelia Warner, James Schlesinger, Patrick Kennedy.