Session 9

This is kind of an odd attempt at a horror movie, about a small company that wins the bid to get all the asbestos and whatnot out of this abandoned insane asylum in one week. Because the town intends to turn it into their new town hall.

Honestly, who in the fuck would want their town hall in an insane asylum? I guess that's one way to cut down on people coming by to complain or file permits or petitions.

It's a crew of five guys, and each of them has some problem or the other. Gordon is trying to keep this business together, and things are tense at home. This job should really take two weeks, but he promised they'd do it in one, but had to hire his entirely inexperienced nephew Jeff as an extra hand. Phil (David Caruso) hates Hank because Hank stole his girlfriend. Hank is trying to find an exit plan. Mike is thinking about going back to law school, then gets really interested in the tape-recorded sessions he finds in the basement of interviews with this one patient with multiple personalities.

(I thought the Doctor on the tapes was voiced by Caruso as well, and that was going to mean something, but it's actually an actor named Lonnie Farmer. Wasn't sure how that twist was going to work even if I was right.)

The movie can't quite seem to make up its mind what kind of horror movie it is. Sometimes it feels like it's playing with a supernatural presence within the asylum, or that some horror still roams the halls. Other times it's aimed at the danger being the stress one of the guys is under. But it won't commit, so it just wanders back and forth between the two poles. There's a lot of gaps in among all that.

It never really clarifies why Mike is so interested in these tapes. There's mention that his dad was district attorney, but the patient's situation doesn't seem like the sort of thing where the case would ruin someone's career. It may simply be meant to be curiosity, but the way he keeps faking like the breakers are blowing so he has an excuse to sneak back down there makes it seem like more. Hank is attacked, disappears, reappears, disappears again, is found, and I'm not sure he could do all that in the condition he was apparently in. When the crew is looking for Hank, they (and we) hear someone running on the next floor up and the crew splits up to keep us guessing about who has bad intentions. But we never find out who exactly they heard, and it can't be a case of just one of them being crazy because all of them hear the footsteps.

There was the potential to be a decent - not great, but solid - low-budget thriller movie, and they flushed it down the tubes.