October Horror 2011: Day 7 - The Ninth Gate

The Ninth Gate is the most modern feeling movie of the season, although The Order was released 4 years after it.  The Ninth Gate was released in 1999, along with a slew of other Satanic stories, and stars a pre-Burton Johnny Depp.

The premise here is that there is a book, written in the mid 17th century by Aristide Torchia called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows.  There are 3 surviving copies of the book in 1999 and one is in the possession of a Boris Balkan, who hires Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) to authenticate the book against the other 2 copies for him.


Corso is a rare-book buyer and dealer who operates on the shadier side of things, often conning people out of collections in order to sell them at a profit.  He smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish, to the point where it's a bit ridiculous.


Corso's investigation into the books leads him into a massive conspiracy involving a secret society of very rich and powerful people who are attempting to use the book to summon ultimate power or commune with the devil or something.


The writing in this movie is probably the best we've had all week.  It's very focused, but very natural and quite witty when it needed to be.  It was mostly a mystery with a few supernatural elements sprinkled in for effect, but would've been just as entertaining without them.  The excellent character writing and acting actually helps you relate to these characters as people, that sort of thing is important when you're watching a movie where the majority of the characters are eccentric and absurdly rich book collectors.

The only real points playing against the movie are the ending, which was just a bit confusing, and the soundtrack.  They'd managed to explain everything up to that point without a painfully obvious exposition dump but just kindof dropped the ball in the last 5 minutes.  I had no idea who the girl was supposed to be or how she related to the rest of the plot, except to haul Depp along when he lost the trail.  The soundtrack had some great moments where the orchestral score really complimented the epicness of what was going on, but other times it dropped into this funky bassoon and trumpet based theme which was very reminiscent of bits of Ghostbusters or those black & white "industry!" Disney cartoons.  It really did the atmosphere the movie was trying to build a disservice.


Children of the Corn was probably the best "horror" movie so far, but this I think is the best movie in general.  It was just really fun to watch even if the supernatural elements were superfluous and without them this would have no right belonging in October Horror Season.


I guess that's a back handed endorsement: It's not horror, but it is creepy at a few points and a good movie, watch it anyway.


With this movie, Cults week is over.  Kicking off Re-rererererererereerere-whatever will be 2004's Dawn of the Dead, a remake of the 1978 Dawn of the Dead.