Am I missing something? Did everyone else see something that I didn't see? Or is this film just plain bad? To be fair the movie is extremely creepy until you see the credits rolling and realize that the entire film was building up to nothing.

The plot follows a Hazmat team exterminating the old Danvers State Mental Hospital which supposedly has some history of satanic rituals or other such nonsense, which was mentioned once during the film and has nothing to do with the eventual outcome of the plot. I suppose it was thrown in, like many other aspects of the film, as a red herring to keep your brain turning, because lord knows there wasn't enough plot to do that. Most of the scenes were just a bunch of men drinking beer, ragging on each other and doing construction.

Oh, and let's not forget one of the characters having an uncanny fascination with this one former patient named Mary Hobbes who has three alter egos, The Princess, Billy and Simon, the last one who becomes the pseudo-antagonist. By viewing her files we learn a bit of back-story about the patient, which again has nothing to do with anything else, except the final alter ego, Simon. These tapes are arranged into sessions, and the last session, session 9 (from which we get the title) reveals Simon to us.

The idea of giving each character a mini-story involving this hospital was courageous, but executed in the most horrible way. We learn a lot of back-story which (I promise, this is the last time) has NOTHING to do with the overall plot. The point of psychological horror is to make the viewer not feel safe, even if the “bad-guy” isn't dancing around in front of you with a knife in his hand. The problem is the movie fails to instill that sense of fear. It does okay in the beginning; for the first thirty minutes I genuinely afraid of the place, but then nothing happens and eventually it wanes.

Getting back to my original point about movie's being able to make us feel emotion, where was it in this film? I literally was just waiting and waiting for something scary to happen. I gave up on that at about the hour mark and was just praying for anything. The problem was we didn't get to know these characters and I, for one, was entirely apathetic to their plight, especially since most of the characters are so unlikable.

Now I will give the film one thing. Until you realize that it's going nowhere, it's scary because of the all the lingering doubt surrounding the place. Its tagline “Fear is a Place” is entirely true. But all that fails in the end, and we're left with a paranoid delusion of a film.

So, the final verdict… you can live without seeing this film. (3 out of 10).

I Am Legend is a retelling of the classic Charlton Heston film Omega Man. Well technically, it's a retelling of Omega Man which is a retelling of The Last Man on Earth (with Vincent Price), which is a retelling of the 1954 novel entitled I Am Legend.

This movie tells the tale of US Army Colonel Robert Neville, who is a military genius, scientist and the last man on earth. The key difference between I Am Legend and Charlton Heston is the reason for the worldwide plague. The 1970s Omega Man natural chalks up the cause to nuclear war between China and the Soviet Union. Modern day I Am Legend decided to take a more “don't play God” route and went with a viral strain used to cure cancer that went bad and infected all but 1% of the population of the globe.

So we've got 90% instant mortality rate (these and the following figures occur within the film). Of the remaining 10%, 1% were immune for reasons that are never explained. The other 9% became what are referred to as “Dark Seekers”. Basically a cross-breed of vampires and zombies. The film becomes Neville's journey to develop a cure for the disease to make the Dark Seekers human again. His faithful companion Sam, a dog, is his only company in the destroyed New York City.

Now I'm gonna say it. Will Smith's acting was incredible in this film. But that was it. That was the only redeeming factor of this movie. Something that stuck out to me was when I had seen Neville do a great deal of irrelevant things (i.e. working out, bathing his dog and talking to mannequins) and then suddenly realizing that half of the movie had passed. While I get the need to point out how the lonely life is taking a toll on Neville's brain (particularly for the last twenty minutes of the film), there should be a limit.

They do pepper in a couple of action scenes which look like they were ripped from Day of the Dead, although the zombies in Day of the Dead didn't give me the heebie-jeebies as much as these ones. The first encounter with the Dark Seekers shows them standing around huddled in a corner, not moving a muscle. There probably is nothing scarier than a bad guy who knows you're there but isn't looking at you, not to mention a horde of them.

The plot doesn't really twist or deviate and is more obvious than predicting that the New York Jets will lose a football game. But still I can't really blame the film since it's only following after its big brother and in the end remakes of classic films just never work out.

And speaking of time-filling, what is the relevance of us being forced to watch two minutes of Shrek with Will Smith lip syncing all the dialogue? I mean at that point the director must have just given up and said “now how can we fuck up this film more?” And then we get Bob Marley's backstory which is apparently the point of the film, but it just seemed like I had accidentally turned on the director's commentary.

However despite all this I do recommend viewing it. After all, it's like your five-year old kid's spring play. You know its gonna be bad, but you love your kid and that makes it good… sort of.

So, the final verdict… you should rent this film. (6 out of 10)

Donnie Darko is a “cult classic”. Now to me, the aforementioned term of endearment means a poorly shot film which has either an artistic message or a lot of gore. This movie took that stereotype and drop-kicked it out the cellar door (a pun which you will understand when you watch the movie.)

The movie follows the twisted journey of the film's title character. He is a suburban teenager who is, to put it gently, fucking nuts. He has dreams about a deranged animal which is allegedly a rabbit, but looks more like a donkey mixed with one the members of Slipknot. This rabbit, named Frank, tells him to that world is coming to an end on Halloween and continues to give him otherworldly information and advice, such as flooding his school, burning down a motivational speaker's home and so on.

The all-star cast is a nice complement to this film, including Drew Barrymore as the hot English teacher and Patrick Swazye as the motivational speaker, author and head of a pornography ring. The problem with these superstars is that they didn't compare to the Donnie, which is saying something.

The whole film plays like a dream sequence, and the plot is simply mind-bending. It has a lot to do with time travel and wormholes that pop out of people's chests like the monster from Aliens. I was so confused by the middle of the film that I decided to just go with the flow and after that I enjoyed the film thoroughly for what it was.

That's what makes Donnie Darko such an interesting film. It doesn't exactly follow convention and instead of it being a story that is based around plots or characters the story seems to be based entirely on emotions. It reaches a level of immersion that I didn't think a film could attain. By the end of the film you actually feel like you are Donnie himself, which makes the climatic finale a total mind-freak.

The writing in this film is also worth mentioning because of its phenomenal execution. The most memorable line occurs after Donnie's romantic interest teases him about his name.

“Donnie Darko?” She asks. “What kind of a name is that? It makes you sound like a superhero.”

To which Donnie replies coolly. “What makes you think I'm not?”

Graham Greene's short story “The Destructors” appears to be the spiritual basis for this film, as it is mentioned and explained during the film. Calling it the epigraph of the film may be a bit much, but the similarities are astounding, particularly the part where Donnie remarks that “destruction is a form of creation… they wanted to see what happens when they destroy the world.”

I was skeptical about this film, but I must say that it has won me over. It is an astounding story that I believe everyone should experience.

So, the final verdict… you're video library is not complete without this film. (9 out of 10).