Available on DVD, Tuesday February 22
Cast:
Sara Foster as Roslyn
Cary Elwes as Dr. Clement
Michael Biehn as Det. Marling
Gabriel Mann as Cole
Directed by: Andrew Shortell
It’s nice that Ghost House Underground has chosen to go for a genre within horror that hasn’t been beat to death over the course of the last 25 years with yet another tale about spooky sh*t that goes down at a hospital/psychiatric ward.
Yeah, that’s sarcasm, because that’s exactly what Psych 9 is.
A local hospital is closing its doors for good. But before that can be done, there’s a hefty amount of pesky paperwork that needs to be done. Sorting of charts, organizing medical records, placing x-ray photos in the right bin. All rather mundane in the grand scheme of things, but for some reason the hospital staff thinks this routine task should be done in the middle of the night and hires Roslyn (Sara Foster) for the job.
Now, despite the fact we really aren’t clued into why she has to file paperwork at night, Roslyn isn’t in the best frame of mind. She wants to get pregnant really badly but she can’t due to her oven not cooking correctly and this puts a serious dent in her marriage to Cole (Gabriel Mann). To make matters worse, there is a serial killer that is roaming about hacking people up all within two miles of one central location. You guessed it, the hospital.
As Psych 9 progresses, we see that Roslyn just isn’t suffering from the fact that she can’t conceive, she’s suffering from traumatic abuse from her father. It was so bad that she ended up killing her father just to stop the abuse because her mother certainly wasn’t doing anything about it.
And so it goes on and what began as a tale about the haunting of a hospital and one woman’s journey into the supernatural is completely abandoned, instead now focusing on Roslyn’s terrible childhood and how it is impacting her entire life. We get moments of where we think again the hospital may be haunted but these moments are quickly passed over for more psycho-babble and ugly memories of a childhood that was anything but pleasant.
In fact, so much time is spent delving into the childhood of Roslyn that you begin to think you’ve tuned into some twisted Lifetime movie rather than a haunted thriller.
Of course, much like any mediocre horror film, after 40 minutes of trying to swerve us to believe that all the spooky things we’ve seen are just figments of Roslyn’s imagination they bring back the supernatural aspect as shock value. The problem is that there is no shock because you can see it coming and anything that could be scary has gone out the window. And with no logical explanation about the serial killer, ghosts in the hospital and Roslyn’s maybe journey into complete madness, we are left with a whimper of an ending.
