There's no way I could avoid a horror movie with Paris Hilton in it. I admit it -- I like Paris Hilton, even though her acting is as flat as her chest, and she seems particularly out of place in this particular movie. As far as I can tell, her character is the only American in a group of old schoolmates getting together to celebrate one of their own's 21st birthday.

It turns out that Paris doesn't have as significant of a role as the DVD cover would lead you to believe, so it is possible for even the most ardent of Paris haters to approach Nine Lives as just another horror film -- just another disappointing horror film, to be exact.

So these nine friends get together at the palatial, Scottish family estate of Tim (Patrick Kennedy). No one minds that a huge snowstorm is coming because there is plenty of good food, an ample supply of alcohol and all the women are fine. The only mystery seems to concern who is going to sleep with whom and how soon. Then, before any shenanigans can commence, one of the nine goes and gets herself murdered.

At first, the quickly assembled others are worried that someone else is in the house, but they come to realize the murderer is one of them when they learn that he also attacked one of the guys in the library. By now, they're snowbound in the manor house with no working phones of any kind. Rather than staying together, they naturally head off in different directions, thus making the killer's job of picking them off one by one a good bit easier.

This is no ordinary killer, either. It's an avenging spirit who can switch bodies, a fact that lovely brainiac Laura (Amelia Warner) somehow figures out based on very little evidence. The end result is that the friends can't even trust one another implicitly because any of them could be the next killer.

The weak storyline is somewhat less than believable, the deaths seem to involve a surprisingly small amount of blood loss, and characters started dying before I could clearly distinguish who was who among them. Logic is turned on its head and then pretty much ignored altogether as events play out. You know only one person is going to survive it all, but it's hard to pick a champion among them. (I wanted to pull for Laura, but her bossiness and her poor exercise of existentialist thought kept trumping the fact that she looked like a young Catherine Zeta-Jones.)

In the end, Nine Lives is just another in a long line of plot-challenged, disappointing horror films. A weak plot makes this an average horror film at best -- I can't even say it had any real potential because it is just taking us to places we've already been.