Clarissa Explains It All In "Nine Dead"
Holy crap, Clarissa has gone CRAZY! (WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!)
Most of us remember the lovely actress and girl of my dreams back when I was young boy from watching Nickelodeon's Clarissa Explains It All. I was always wondering what ever happened after the show dropped off. Turns out Melissa Joan Hart has been a busy girl. (To see what she has done click here.) She has done so major things and not so major things, such as Sabrina The Teenage Bitch.... I mean Witch. That very popular show that was always mind numbing to me. Then she was on the show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit for an episode, as well as Robot Chicken. But nothing since Sabrina have I seen her in where the role actually made her the main character.
So here we go with the actual review of Nine Dead. If you are to check on the IMDB rating board the film isn't doing so hot (5.2 star rating out of 10). Usually that means it's bad, and the thing about that is I didn't check that before I watched this movie. I'm glad I didn't, otherwise it would of screwed the pooch on how the movie actually was. Sometimes you just got to go out on a whim and try to watch a movie and see how it goes (and I do have to say thanks Netflix for giving me the capability of watching these movies live stream, with no product placement intended). With that out of the way, the movie really had a weird feel to it. It didn't go right into explaining what was going on, yet it was fun to watch the masked villain going from place to place picking the nine people up in the fashion he did. He used methods such as mace, taser, guns, and various blunt objects.
Daniel Baldwin (Left) and William Lee Scott (Right)
One thing that made me laugh was the fact that it said in the starting credits that Danial Baldwin was in the movie. I personally think that was a waste to even put his name on the picture. The reason for that is he got maced, and his friend that was with him was the one who got tased and dragged into the car. So throughout the movie I sat there wondering when the fuck Daniel Baldwin was coming back into this. Believe me: I was thinking where the angry detective that would be on the outside of the situation was pulling strings pissing and moaning trying to find his partner. But no! He never came back into Nine Dead, not even as a flashback. Talk about a waste of a cameo, if you can call it that.
So after all that fun running around tasing and macing people it finally brings it to the room they all ended up in. They have nine poles that they are handcuffed to, and the objective is that the masked man gives them 10 minutes per person that he picks at random order to shoot. Yet the main thing is that they have to find what all their connections are and why they have ended up in this room together, and if they don't they all die one by one. Now you might be saying "Hmmm...why does this sound familiar?" Well I got the answer: it's another version of Saw, except there are no crazy-ass death traps for each individual. I wish they did do it in the Saw fashion, since it would've been cool to have a Domino Rally setup of the machines killing the people instead of the guy coming in and executing all of them.
The masked killer (gotta admit: that's a cool mask)
So after the masked killer leaves the room they have a special timer in the room that keeps ticking away for the ten minutes. The characters that pertain to the story deals with an insurance person, a Chinese woman, a police officer, a priest, a district attorney, a child molester/rapist, a loan shark, a small time crook and an illegal gun trafficker. (Sounds like one of those type of jokes where all you need to do is end it with "walk into a bar," and it would be all over.)
With the story going on it seems that the characters like to piss off one another, but then it finally gets to the point where they finally start figuring out little tid bits of why the hell they were in the room. Personally I feel Nine Dead is a must-see. I want to say that the ending is a pretty big shocker in my opinion. I liked how the movie presented itself, and it seemed like if it had more backing of money it wouldn't have had gone to the straight-to-DVD setup (but that's just me). If you got an hour and-a-half to kill Nine Dead would be well worth it.
NINE DEAD
Company: HartBreak Films
Length: 93 minutes
Movie Type: Psychological Thriller
Released: 2010
**** ½ (out of five)
P.S. Maybe the title of this article should of been:
