"SESSION 9" Official Trailer (2001)

Because I am sick of Dan posting this horrible writing advice from this hack writer, I thought I'd post a trailer of a film I streamed last night.

This is an example of a movie that didn't know where to go. On one hand, it is supposed to be a "horror" film (read: scary) and then on the other hand, the film spends a lot of time focusing on the working class characters hired on to clean up an abandoned insane asylum.

Ok, this isn't nec., a bad thing, right? Except for the fact that the movie doesn't have enough character development for it to work on the working-class character level, and then it is not even remotely scary enough to work on the horror level. After watching, I have no idea what this was even about because the ending was left very ambiguous. And while ambiguity is great for a poetic film, it doesn't work for a rote, linear a-b-c plot driven film as this.

I still have no idea what "Session 9" was referring to--there is a case involved but I fail to see how it connects with the men cleaning the building. Did the looney bin "possess" them in some way? Was the guy who became nuts somehow related to it? It tried to offer "twists" to a plot that made little sense.

It is a rarity for me to complain about plot points being unanswered. But if the film fails on the level of depth, character development AND horror, what else is there? This was like the director had one foot on the boat and one on the dock, and neither worked. The ending peters out and I have no idea what the point was. Something tells me neither did the folks who wrote this film.