Screenhead

Yes, I know that The Ninth Gate has been around for some time now, and reviewing it may seem a little out of the ordinary, but it’s getting a re-release on Blu-Ray, so it’s an opportune time to go back and visit this collectible from the vault.

Featuring Johnny Depp as unscrupulous (it’s the perfect term for him because they actually CALL him that in the movie) chain-smoking rare book dealer Dean Corso, who’s been contracted to find the last copies of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book that reputedly has the power to summon the devil himself.

This is not hyperbole.

That’s actually the plot in a nutshell right there, and in true Roman Polanski style (yes, he actually directed a Johnny Depp movie), it will be incomprehensible and occasionally frightening.  The Ninth Gate is an extremely dense work, and if you’re not big on rare books, chances are this is going to go skating right over you.  This is Cigarette Burns for the literati.

The question of course is, how game are you for a gigantic treasure hunt where the treasure is the most evil book known to mankind and the road to get it is littered with dead bodies.  As a horror movie, it’s not that scary, and as a thriller, there’s not much thrill here. It’s really rather sedate, for the most part, and won’t be throwing a whole lot of shocks at you.  But it does do a bang-up job of sheer foreboding, and in that sense it succeeds admirably.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, therefore, assigns the resurgent Blu-Ray title a seven out of ten for being a rather cold thriller that does still deliver, just not so much.