I saw this Polanski horror with Johnny Depp when it played in the cinemas. I remember not liking it too much, but I still watched it again was it was on TV recently.
Ninth Gate is one of these early ‘horror’ films with an occult theme. This time the story is that Depp is a ‘book-detective’, a collector of old books to sell them with profit. Boris Balkan is a fervent collector of works about the devil and he has one of the three remaining copies of “The Nine Gates To The Kingdom Of Shadows”, a truly magical book from which big powers can be drawn. Balkan hires Dean Corso (Depp) to compare his copy with the other remaining two. Corso discovers that the copies are not identical, the nine engravings are not the same. Six are signed by the author, three by Lucifer. The story goes that the author poured directly from the devilish source. Corso figures that the nine engravings of Lucifer will unravel the secrets of the book, but of course his quest isn’t without problems. Corso’s employer at least tries to gain ultimate power with a childish ritual, but when Corso himself has the real and original nine engravings, he only has to walk through the ninth gate. A mediocre film with a terrible end.