A guy hates nine people, and for reasons about which the movie would very much like you to be curious he tazes them all and chains them in his basement. One must die every ten minutes until they figure out what's bugging that guy.

Wow is that Clarissa explained it all? Are the 90s that long ago now too?

I don't do this often 'cause I don't want to sound like the sort of people who are always hollering "this isn't a real horror movie", but this isn't a real horror movie and needs to GTFO the horror section on Netlfix.

I guess there are nine dead, all by method of dramatic gunshot sound effect. Don't come around here looking for your onscreen depictions of horror violence. We don't need no saw in our Saw; this movie's all about the cereberal character driven narrative. Next time you hear someone harping there's not enough plot and character development in horror tie them to a damn chair in front of this movie and see what kind of tune they're singing after eighty solid minutes of:

"Okay, so Christian stole money from Mrs Woo to pay back loan shark Sully and Buffy the teenage werewolf wrongly implicated innocent Billy for the crime with the help of dirty cop Frank who once beat up black guy Leon who sold the gun to Colonel Mustard who confessed tax fraud to Father Francis and DAMMIT that still doesn't explain why pedophile Coogan and insurance adjuster Bob are here! We're back to square one! We're all gonna die! Everybody shut up! Fuck you!".

I'm perfectly cool with the strangers trapped in a room deal. I sort of enjoyed that Five Characters In Search Of An Exit episode of Twilight Zone, and ah, well I don't like any of the other ones I can think of but there was probably a Dr Who or something like that which wasn't too bad. My point is I'm sure it can be done well and I'm not rubbishing it as a form. I feel like I come off like some kind of caveman who only cares about seeing former actor Jeffrey Rogers get split down the crotch with a machete while walking on his hands! Whoo! But I watch arty stuff like Jim Jarmusch movies too you philistines.

I'll even say I'm glad they tried to make this movie. There are plenty of incompetent slasher movies out there full to bursting with poorly executed gore scenes and insufferable teenage assholes, so there's room for a few bad ones of these too. It's hard not to be kind of interested in the movie's trick for a little while at least. About a half hour I'd say, until the quality of what's being experienced bores through the crust formed by one's monkey-like curiosity. 'Cause when a movie relies this heavily on plot and dialogue, poor plot and dialogue really stick out.

In the case of Nine Dead (shouldn't it be 9ine Dead or N9 Dead?) it's insidious because the movie isn't horrible, just off enough to make the brain balk a little whenever anyone delivers a line. Most of the performances seem like audition tapes that were rejected because the actor didn't quite nail it, though I do approve of John Terry as today's killer. Jack's dad from Lost? "Don't let the air conditioning fool you, we are in Hell".

There are no lines like that in the movie. To give the performers the benefit of a doubt it may be impossible to effectively deliver the film's dialogue. Again it's not horrible, just off. It's all a bit too stiff and expository to feel like anything people would actually say, especially handcuffed in a basement. The wording is like something from an English as a second language workbook. Consider the difference between "whatever may occur" and "no matter what happens". Like that.

Also there's a bulletproof vest in the movie. You can't have a bulletproof vest. It's always, always bad writing to have a bulletproof vest that the audience doesn't know about in a show. Okay I'll give Twin Peaks a pass 'cause they made a big weird deal out of it and David Lynch can do what he wants but for everyone else if you're going to have a bulletproof vest you might as well just have a coconut fall on Gilligan's head and give him amnesia until a subsequent coconut impact makes him okay again.

And the plot, well, if they were going for a miniature version of Lost then I think the story being revealed needed to be less completely mundane. I have to talk spoilers here so if you want to watch this at full fascination level maybe go check your bigfoot trail cams or something. I like horror movies see, I watch horror movies, and at the end of Nine Dead I realise that I have instead just spent an hour and a half watching a movie about a kid being framed for robbing a convenience store. That's an episode of some network TV cop drama. And I guess the ending is supposed to be artsy? Woman walking down some stairs while cops are looking around, roll credit? You can let the camera run out of film at a random point in the movie and call it art I guess, but Jim Jarmusch probably wouldn't.

Here's my ending. So everybody is there because they did something that turned out not so good for this kid Wade Greely right? The events of Wade Greely's life are much discussed and explored in the film. The characters literally start drawing flowcharts and timelines on the wall about Wade freaking Greely. So here's how I end it. Killer comes in with his "why are you here" and they all go "we discovered it at last!" (that's just how they'd say it in this movie too) "we're here because we did these specific bad things that resulted in the death of Wade Greely and we're really sorry about Wade Greely so let us go now like you promised you would if we remembered what we did to Wade Greely!" Killer says "who the hell is Wade Greely" and shoots them all. Thank you!