BEFORE: No authors tonight - but Johnny Depp carries over, and plays a rare book dealer, which is sort of in the same ballpark. Directed by Roman Polanski, so obviously this was shot in Europe, not in the U.S.
THE PLOT: A rare book dealer, while seeking out the last two copies of a demon text, gets drawn into a conspiracy with supernatural overtones.
AFTER: Depp's character, Dean Corso, is sort of shady - estimating the worth of people's book collections, while walking out with the rarest of the books under his arm after paying them a fraction of their value. But for the latter part of the film, he's the one taken for a ride as he tries to verify a rare book, called "The Nine Gates". It seems there are allegedly only three copies in the world, but one of the owners wants to prove that his is the only original, so he hires Corso to track down the other two and compare them to his.
The kicker is, the book supposedly contains some way to raise the Devil himself, if you read the book, or decipher the illustrations, and solve the riddles, divide by pi, and...look, it's complicated, OK? Did you think it should be easy to invoke the Devil? Absolutely not, otherwise anyone could do it - and really, don't you think it should be left to the professionals?
So Corso heads for a tour of Europe's book experts, meets a mysterious girl on a train, and then finds that anyone who helps him or owns one of the books starts to meet with an untimely accident (there's a lot of that going around this week). Funny how he keeps blacking out at inopportune times - you don't suppose...nah...
I suppose this also would have been a good candidate for Movie #666 - but the actual nature of the book, and Satan's presence, is so ambiguous here. I guess I'm glad I saved it for Halloween Eve, because I did watch 1/2 of the movie on Oct. 31, which according to folklore would be the best time to hold a Black Mass, as the veil between our world and the netherworld would be at its thinnest...oohhh...scary.
What's really scary is to see characters who are described as book experts and book collectors handling rare books without wearing gloves - or smoking and drinking near them. As a collector myself (OK, comic books, but still) it made me cringe. Doesn't anyone in Europe even wash their hands first? Similarly, Depp's character is given an ultra-rare book to study, and the way he tosses it around, throws it into his bag and even leaves it unattended should have gotten him fired from his gig on Day 1. Where's the chain of custody if he just leaves the book in his hotel room? Couldn't someone have just switched it when he wasn't looking?
Also starring Frank Langella (last seen in "Superman Returns"), Lena Olin (last seen in "Hollywood Homicide"), and Emmanuelle Seigner.
RATING: 5 out of 10 black robes.
SPOOK-O-METER: 3 out of 10. A couple gruesome deaths, but no payoff.
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