USA, 2008
Review:
JA Kerswell
You know you’re in trouble when the most diverting thing about a movie is Travis Van Winkle’s abs. ASYLUM is a thoroughly unconvincing slice of slasher adjacent hokum that sucks the last vapours from the corpse of Freddy Krueger. The wise-cracking ghost of a psychotic doctor menaces students living in a refurbished dorm adjoining an abandoned insane asylum. Yes, you read that right. Good production values are pretty much all it has going for it.
Freshman student Madison (Sarah Roemer) arrives at university and enrols in Tagert Hall dorm. She is carrying some trauma, as she and her brother watched their father shoot himself dead when they were kids. Years later, her brother also killed himself at—you guessed it—Tagert Hall. Despite the incredulity of her mother (I know the feeling), Madison insists it is the right move to go to the same place her brother blew his brains out to gain some closure—or some bullshit like that.
During orientation, she meets fellow over-aged students whose personalities boil down to one word. There’s Broody (Holt - a 30-year-old Jake Muxworthy), who broods broodily at her. Then there’s the Asshole (Tommy - Travis Van Winkle), who says things like: “There are some hot fucking bitches in this place” as he flexes his bro pecs. And Flirty (Ivy - Ellen Hollman), the blonde who giggles at everything Tommy says. Bookish (Maya - Carolina Garcia), who, of course, wears glasses. Lastly, there is String (Cody Kasch), a 16-year-old wonder kid with hair like a macaroon who already has his own silly nickname because he can make elaborate string figures with his fingers. Yes, this passes for character development.
String tells the group that he somehow hacked eBay and cost them $16 million—yet isn’t in juvie. He also tells them the story of the abandoned asylum in the wing next door as he hacks into a presumably Top Secret dime-store Wiki knockoff. He then tells them how, in the 1930s, a doctor (Mackey - Joe Inscoe) performed lobotomies on scriptwriters … sorry, on teenagers, before going insane and launching a killing spree. The teenage survivors turned the tables and strung up the bad doctor before stabbing him in the face with surgical instruments. His ghost, supposedly, still wanders the halls. String says he can hack into the security door that leads from their dorm into the old asylum (after eBay, it must be a cinch). Despite meeting mere minutes before, the clique are now inseparable and decide to forego a ‘Hos and Pimps’ party to go exploring the old asylum …
Now, ASYLUM could have been a fun slice of blood-splattered popcorn hokum, but it just feels like a Xerox of other better movies. Slasher films, of course, are repetitive by nature, but this is such a pale imitation of the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series it is difficult to drum up much enthusiasm. Hallucinations substitute nightmares. To no one's great surprise, yes, the ghost of Mackey is real and, for some reason, is wearing leather bondage gear. The group manage to raise him from his eternal slumber (something the movie almost induced in me), and he repays them by summoning up trauma from their childhood and killing them in ways that link to said trauma—with HOSTEL (2005) casting its long shadow. So, String is killed by what looks like Macrame (which is a bit on the nose). Asshole used to be a fat kid, so he sees his mother trying to force-feed him before the good doctor chops off his lips. And so on.
Horror films can be very effective in juxtaposing reality and fantasy to create discombobulating unease. However, ASYLUM is just a mess. Dr Burke at least has original killing instruments, as he wields dual lobotomy picks. But that’s it as far as originality goes. Despite his sub-Freddy cracks, Inscoe sometimes tips into genuinely unhinged intensity, but the vortex of generics sucks any remaining life out of the proceedings. Despite its very healthy budget, the film’s laziness extends to not even really bothering to try and recreate the 1930s feel in the flashbacks—with one vigilante teen having hair like Shakira. And to top it off, ASYLUM stumbles to a stand-around-and-watch-some-CGI before finally ending with a ‘seriously, is that it?’ conclusion.
Director David R. Ellis made much better popcorn horror movies with FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003) and, to a lesser extent, THE FINAL DESTINATION (2009). He, of course, also helmed the hot-for-five-minutes SNAKES ON A PLANE (2006). ASYLUM was shot independently over five weeks in Carolina in late 2006. It was originally meant to get a sizeable theatrical bow, which its $9 million budget and 2.35: 1 aspect ratio certainly suggests (it did play theatres in some overseas territories). Ellis says it was because horror was underperforming on screens at the time, but it is more likely that it simply wasn’t very good. Critic at the South Carolina paper The Herald—which reported on production—gave the film a negative review saying: “The folks at Hyde Park Films know they’ve got a stinker on their hands.” MGM eventually picked it up for a home video instead.
Aannnnddd, the award goes to … Travis Van Winkle’s abs.
BODY COUNT 8:
Female 2 / Male 6