Review of Session 9 (2001) by Deanna M — 22 Jul 2010

*ahem* For the life of me, I cannot understand why this movie has been getting so many great reviews. 1) The intro is slow, boring and uneventful. 2) There is NOTHING scary in it--technically, it's more demented than spooky. 3) The ONLY reasonably interesting part is the recording of the psycho girl. 4) You can tell it was cheaper than dirt to make: while the shots are decent, you can tell the camera was something like what you'd find in a college classroom.

I will say, on the positive side, it had the potential to be creepy because of the location and the circumstances, but, in the end, this wasn't achieved because of... and I'm really pondering my word choice here... because the creators used cheesy shots for the "scary" moments... a hand darting from WITHIN the camera isn't as shocking as say just letting a human being walk into the dark and scream bloody murder. Nobody (or nothing) has to "jump out" to scare audiences, which many people call "teenage horror." So this movie stayed away from the "jump out" scariness. But they failed to put anything at all in its place. One of the scariest things in horror movies is when something just appears, or is standing there when somebody else moves away. When something walks slowly toward the camera. Stay away from making weird "rooosh" noises as some unseen entity moves behind you... that's so 1990s. Instead, use "bizarrely unnerving noises" to say "hey--there's somebody behind you." Like a clicking of the tongue... a scraping of fingernails... some noise you can identify. If you want to properly kill a character from the point of view of the murderer, don't just move the camera quickly to the victim and let the screen go black. Be craftier... let the actor who is about to be murdered really ACT... let them sell that they're frightened out of their mind... horrified that they've just been stabbed/jabbed/shot... whatever. Or, in my opinion, stay away from the first-person point of view altogether.

In fact, just stay away from this movie if you want to be scared. This isn't a horror movie. It's a psychological slowish thriller. And the ending... well... it offers some glimmer of horror-ness if you don't feel you experience any throughout the first hour and a half.