This construction requires the removal of several rooms full of asbestos and other toxic nastiness, and we arrive on the scene to see Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullan), owner of Hazmat Elimination Company, and his right-hand man Phil (David Caruso) attempting to win the contract from his friend, developer Bill Griggs (Paul Guilfoyle). Perhaps unwittingly, Anderson and Stephen Gevedon's script prefigures the hospital's ultimate fate, for their film finds the building playing itself, right before some kind of undisclosed construction is about to take place. The location in question is - was - Danvers State Insane Asylum, located in Danvers, MA from 1874 until the bulk of it was demolished in 2006 (despite being on the National Register of Historic Places) to make way for apartments. I bring this up, because the 2001 psychological thriller Session 9 relies on the voodoo of location to an almost inconceivable degree of course, there have been plenty of horror pictures that get quite a bit of mileage from a gangbuster set, but this is a damn extreme case: I could possibly be convinced that the difference between " Session 9, minor masterpiece of contemporary psycho-horror" and " Session 9, decent, but fatally muddled murder mystery with a bullshit shocker ending" is solely due to that same voodoo of location and considering that the film's director and co-writer, Brad Anderson, conceived the film specifically to take advantage of a location, I expect he might even agree with me. Murnau by using the same locations Murnau did in the original). (Okay, so it's not: apparently, the phrase was first use in the context of his Nosferatu, explaining his hope that he could channel the spirit of F.W. It was, in essence, his way of justifying his frequent moviemaking trips into the most godforsaken corners of the Amazon with people who more often then not went insane from the process. This refers to the certain aura that a real place can impart on a film shot there, a way that the physical presence of the location affects the cast and crew and even the viewer. Werner Herzog has a phrase that gets quoted a lot: "the voodoo of location". Anyway, it's an excellent subject, and Jessica has my gratitude. Which is turning into a bit of a theme with these. Jessica Brown's delayed pick for a Carry On Campaign review was actually a list of possibilities, of which I made this choice for selfish reasons: I really love the movie and had never come up with a plausible excuse to review it.
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