Psych 9: A low-budget horror movie from Ghost House Underground, about a young woman named Roslyn (Sara Foster), who takes a job working evenings collating records at a closed hospital. The hospital, in addition to the usual treatment areas, also included a psych ward. With only the company of a lone security guard and a doctor on the fifth floor arranging the psych ward records, she is all by her lonesome. And faster than you can “Jack Nicholson snowbound in Colorado!”, Roslyn begins to see and hear things she can’t explain, like ghostly images on the security cameras and vivid hallucinations involving people who aren’t there. And all of it may be connected to the Night Hawk serial killer that is targeting women near and around the closed hospital. Or all of it may have something to do with Roslyn‘s own history of mental illness. Or all of it could just be crap. Cary Elwes plays a psychiatrist that Roslyn encounters in the hospital. Michael Biehn plays a cop tracking down the Night Hawk killer. Chock full of all kinds of self-indulgent editing and quick-cuts, this film is easily less than the sum of its parts. The plot is really a mess, trying to be psychological and supernatural at the same time. The “reveal”, when it comes, doesn’t really resolve anything (like the Night Hawk killer: we find out who it is, and why, but not how). Foster’s acting leaves a lot to be desire - she places Roslyn firmly in sad-sack mode from the first scene, making her neither sympathetic or likable. Here’s a thought - if you’re going to have a heroine, make people want to root for the heroine. Elwes is fine in his role, but he can’t carry the picture. This is not the first film to mine this territory (“Session 9” amongst others) and therei s nothing remarkable here. Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.“
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