NINE MILES DOWN

C6NTAINS S6ME SP6ILERS

Anthony Waller is a name that's rather dropped off the radar after his first film, the underseen thriller Mute Witness, and the not-the-worst-thing-you've-ever-seen An American Werewolf In Paris, a sequel no-one ever really asked for to a film that wasn't as good as The Howling anyway. And this 2009 horror movie is his most recent feature film (according to the IMDb): he's not exactly prolific.

A frustrating and in the end unsuccessful film, this has some nice ideas and visual touches and a terrific central location, but sadly it does very little with them. After the entire crew of a drilling installation in the Sahara disappear, security officer Jackman (Adrian Paul, from the Highlander TV series) drives out there to find it (sorry) deserted except for scientist JC (Kate Nauta, probably best known for her outrageous sexy dental nurse/murderous henchwoman turn in The Transporter 2). What happened to everyone else? Why isn't JC on the personnel lists? What did the drilling crew find Nine Miles Down? Did they actually break through the roof of Hell itself and record the screams of the eternally damned - and is JC actually Lucifer? Or is it all a hallucination, and is Jackman trapped in his own psychological Hell after the deaths of his wife and children?

The idea of genuinely finding Hell is a great one but unexplored beyond listening to an admittedly creepy audio file (though any visual depiction of Hell would inevitably disappoint). Most of the drama itself is a two-hander centred around Jackman's guilt traumas, which isn't that interesting and ends up with him believing his late wife is somehow there with him at a Saharan drill site. And JC is annoying: alternating between hard-nosed we've-got-to-get-out-of-here survivalism, casual indifference to the loss of all her colleagues, and minxing sex-tease. (Why on Earth she brought a backless cocktail dress to the middle of the desert isn't explained, unless she's also part of his fevered imagination.)

The bottom line is that Nine Miles Down isn't very good, despite a couple of nice moments (the cesspit is probably the highlight, and how many films can you say that about?); it has a terrific location but no real atmosphere about it, and it never gets to cut loose with actual horror like, say, Carpenter's The Thing, instead focussing on the psychological. It's not awful, but it's ultimately not much more than a Friday night time-passer. A multi-national co-production between the UK, the USA, Australia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Hungary, and currently available on Amazon Prime.

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