**SPOILERS** As if abducted off the streets of London by aliens in a UFO nine persons complete strangers to each other with the exception of the music composing couple Francis & Cynthia, Hippolyte Girandot & Julienne Davis, end up in this large house with all the door and windows sealed shut.

Getting the lowdown to the situation that their in by the unseen Watcher, Tim Carter, the nine kidnap victims are told that they'll all have to stay locked up there for the next 24 hours until the only survivor will be allowed to leave. The nine are also told by The Watcher that the winner, or survivor, will end up getting a duffel bag stuffed with 5 million dollars in it for his or her effort!

The film then has the befuddled and confused persons try to survive the night only to have greed and hunger take over and control their actions and emotions. One by one the nine end up murdering each other, the first victim was the result of an unfortunate accident, until by the next morning only one survived. It's then that the sole survivor as well as the audience is hit with this twist ending. It's brought out by THe Watcher that the agony that he, or she, wen't through was only the beginning of something that a lot bigger and far more evil that what happened to him and the people, who are now all dead, that were there in the house.

Dennis Hopper plays Father Duffy a man with a conscience who tries to keep everything and everyone from getting out of control only in the end lose control of himself. The musical couple Francis & Cynthia get involved with black rap artist Al B, Ashley Waters, who gets a little too friendly with Cynthia that ends up having devastating results for all three of them.

Fashion designer Max Roy, Peter Capaldi, loses it late in the movie and goes bonkers breaking what little sanity that was still left among the survivors. Max freaks out in his attempt to have everyone there killed so that he can end up having and stuffing himself with all the food, not the 5 million dollars, thats been provided, by The Watcher, for them.

The cop of the group Jay, Raffeallo Degruttola, at first tries to keep order but gets so enraged at Al B who's dislike of police, as well as Jay, is so fanatical and out in the open that the two go after each other like two rats in a cage who haven't been fed for days.

There's also tennis star Claire Leevy, Susie Amy, and her forced roommate, at the house, parolee from prison Shona, Morven Christie. These two are so opposite to each other that putting them both together, that Father Duffy did, was like flicking open a cigarette lighter in a kitchen with an hour long gas leak; the results would be and in fact did become explosive.

The last of the group of nine the beautiful and well endowed Lea, Kelly Brook, who's a dancer and refrains from eating meat is by far the most likable and attractive of the bunch. That's why for some reason it puzzled me why Francis had it in for her during the entire film. When his attempt to electrocute Lea failed, after he at first thought that it succeeded, Francis became by far the most crazed of the already crazed bunch.

It wasn't until the last minute that you not only realized who survive this carnage but what the reason for it really was. By the time the movie ended it was shown to the sole surviver that greed and the violence and murder that goes along with it only leads to more greed and that greed will only be quenched when there's no one left alive to be influenced by it.

9 people in a sealed house. They are told only one of them would leave and he will be given 5 million dollars and then they are left to their own devices. You would expect some subtle psychological drama, but no. All the characters are archetypes, they behave programatically like little robots and after a while they only hurry up the pace since the movie's got to end at one point or another.

They do spend about 10 minutes to break out of the house, I give you that. Why they would chose to pathetically wait for the end the rest of the movie is beyond me. At least half of the movie consists of women shouting incoherently and men fighting for idiotic reasons.

However it is a better than a lot of other movies and it is worth a see, especially if you are a kid or you have tried to watch Das Experiment and stopped in the middle because you couldn't take it. Horror it is not, yet the end is funny and saves a lot of the movie.

I kinda liked Dennis Hopper. Why does he play in movies like that lately? Ntz Ntz Ntz

HOUSE OF 9 is one of those films I'd never even heard of until it showed up on an obscure TV channel in the middle of one night. What it turns out to be is a trapped-in-a-single-location thriller a la CUBE or SAW, with a typically disparate group of strangers waking up and finding themselves locked in a house. The story has been done before in MY LITTLE EYE, and the BIG BROTHER overtones are clear, but this kind of film is quite easy to do well and HOUSE OF 9 is fairly decent in that respect.

The narrative will surprise nobody; initial tensions between opposing character types soon lead to all-out violence and eventual murder, and of course there's a twist ending to turn everything on its head at the climax. But aside from an occasional misstep - a couple of music interludes to pad out the running time, for example - this works well. The dialogue is snappy, the events that follow are surprising but believable, and it all hangs together quite nicely without descending into slasher film nonsense.

The cast is interesting too: Kelly Brook is the nominal heroine and probably gives the best performance I've seen from her, as it's more understated than you'd expect and almost like she'd playing herself. Dennis Hopper is a laugh as the Irish priest, and there's novelty value in seeing a cast-against-type Peter Capaldi in a minor part. Watch out for Hippolyte Girardot's creepy husband, though...