Spooktoberween #16 and 17: Nine Dead and The Awakening

I decided to add some more movies to my watch list and work my way through them for the Halloween run. The first is the Melissa Joan Hart vehicle, 9 Dead. It is a cool little premise (not miles away from the Cube) in which 9 strangers find themselves abducted and locked in a room. A masked dude comes in and tells them that one will die every 10 minutes unless they can figure out why they are in the room. As people start getting offed, it gets harder and harder to figure out what they have in common. This is especially true as the first 20 minutes or so are wasted with people distrusting the premise or plotting to escape.

As the captives start spouting every sin they can think of to confess, a picture finally starts emerging. There is a Chinese woman, an insurance agent, a priest, a pedophile, an assistant DA, a gangster, a thief, a cop and an actor in the room so not a lot of immediate connections. Some revelations go nowhere and one character, in particular has a change of heart at a weird time. The ending is kind of weird and ambiguous when it doesn't need to be. All in all, not the worst way to waste 90 minutes but not a particularly compelling way, either.

Much better was The Awakening. Rebecca Hall (the not Scarjo chick from The Prestige) is a ghost debunker in 1920s England. Dominic "McNulty" West comes to her to ask her to investigate a ghost sighting at the school were he works. I liked the debunking aspects of the movie (as I wish Red Lights had stuck to the same idea a little better) as Hall's character is a like the Sherlock Holmes of fake hauntings. When the really creepy stuff starts going down, it doesn't reach super scary levels. The very British production kind of works as a cheeky bodice-ripping romance as West and Hall smolder at each other in between ghost sightings. The aggro groundskeeper was a subplot too many but there is a decent enough twist that is hard to see coming because they cheat it a whole lot.

If you like period romances or haunted house movies, you could do worse than The Awakening.