A wealthy young Scotsman invites eight of his friends (including Paris Hilton) to his estate. A snowstorm maroons them, but that isn’t a problem until one of them reads from a strange book, freeing an evil ghost to possess and kill.
I like the idea of a spirit that leaps bodies whenever its host is killed, taking over its attacker. It means no one can just stab or shoot the evil force and the protagonists have to come up with a pretty clever plan. This is hardly a new concept and has been done with minor variations in more films than I can count, but none of them have done it well. Certainly not Nine Lives.
The mystery of who the possessed killer might be at any moment is ignored in favor of standard Slasher antics. Everyone is trapped in the enormous house, they all separate (even though a few make grand statements about sticking together), and then get knifed. Whoopee!
Ah, but this one has Paris Hilton. Yes, the idol of those who wants to do nothing with their lives except party and shop (hmmm, wait a minute; maybe I’m being too harsh on her…) has appeared in her first Slasher film. To look at the advertisements, you’d think she was the star. Sorry, she keeps her cloths on (so why was she hired?) and doesn’t have enough lines to demonstrate her acting skill, one way or the other. She’s there; she dies. Outside of leaving the viewer wondering what this one American chick was doing with all these Brits, she barely evokes a thought.
Nine Lives is no worse than a majority of Slashers. Like other British entries, it’s a small, but reasonably made production, with competence in all areas except script. The acting is less than stellar, but next to any Friday the 13th film, it’s the Royal Shakespeare Company at work. But the film is so unnecessary. It offers nothing innovative or even mildly interesting. It’s even low on blood, missing nudity, and devoid of any shocking moments. There’s little time developing the characters, except for one shrill girl who I kept hoping would die. She’s also the main plot device, mysteriously coming up with all the rules of possession based on nothing.
Nine Lives claims to be a ghost story, giving a few scraps of background when the mystic book in found and a justification for the ghost’s actions in an embarrassing voice-over at the end. Those are just blurbs that could have been pulled out of the script without notice. The ghost acts more like a demon to me, and I wonder if in some earlier version of the script, he wasn’t one. Either way, it doesn’t make a lot of difference.