Asylum 2007 MGM Home Entertainment   Buy It Now

I truly think that the horror industry is beyond being in a downward spiral. Just before the new millennium, it seemed as though horror was starting to make a comeback, but then things turned around. It wasn’t ticket sales as much as it was every studio deciding that once again the genre was popular and releasing more and more poor excuses for movies combined with remakes of Asian and classic titles. Then there are the studios who decided that since Asian remakes were popular, it might be a good idea to simply license each and every one of them, sight unseen I would assume. If you think that horror has hit an all-time low, it’s about to get even lower.

Asylum is just the latest in the trend of throwing together every possible idea into one pot and hoping for the best, and the best in this instance just isn’t that good. Madison (Sarah Roemer) is about to start college and it turns out that the dorm that she’s going to be living in has just been reopened after being closed for 60 years. That seems fine except that strange things are happening and one of the new students, String (Cody Kasch) has found evidence that at one point in the history of the school, the dorm used to be an asylum. String is the first to disappear as strange events begin to fall the new students, each of who has a secret in their past that they want to keep hidden, and it isn’t long before the doctor comes calling for Madison.

What we learn through the course of the movie is that the good doctor decided that more medical approaches for curing his patients wasn’t working and instead used his own methods, some of which were successful, but this was also something that lead to the torture and even death of some of the patients. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this really nothing more than the plot of the remake of House on Haunted Hill with a few twists? Doctor Burke (Mark Rolston) terrorizes each student in a strange, dreamlike place that isn’t unlike the efforts made by dreamtime slayer Freddy Krueger, the only difference being that at least Krueger is a memorable horror villain, if not a little cheesy. Burke is nothing more than a pale imitation of the overplayed killer mixed with a bit of Doctor Vannacutt from House on Haunted Hill just to make things interesting.

Asylum is nothing more than a very sub par; follow-the-path-made-by-every-other-horror-film-before-you type of movie. The idea that every student coincidentally has some traumatic history that they’ve been hiding plays along the lines of Boogeyman II, a sequel that managed to outdo the original simply by showing that the movies could get even worse, but Asylum even manages to lower the bar further when it comes to bad movie making. We have the stereotypical jock, Tommy (Travis Van Winkle), who comes across as the character that you absolutely hate, though not as much as the dorm counselor, Rez (Randall Sims.) The film also tosses in that strange and creepy old man that has to be met within the first few minutes of the movie, Wilbur Mackey (Joe Inscoe) who seems to be privy to the impending doom that will soon follow. Of course, he gives a dire warning that isn’t heeded, there are rumors about his past until it’s finally time to consult him about what has transpired past and present, and of course he happened to have been a patient year prior.

As the events in the dorm get stranger, each student feels compelled to tell their deepest, darkest secrets, something that we already know is simply leading up to their death at some point when the doctor comes to cure them. If you look at the history of the slasher film though, something that Asylum so desperately wants to be but can’t even come close to becoming, the motive in this movie makes little sense. Freddy went after the children of the parents that killed him, Jason was killing those at Camp Crystal Lake for the purpose of revenge, Pinhead only is after those who open the box of escape the confines of hell, and the doctor here, who we learn was killed by staff and patients at the asylum, is now going after students who have no real connection to him. The only thing that loosely ties them to him is the fact that they all have traumatic events in their past, but they are also one of a number of groups of new students. Do they others in the dorm suffer the same fate? Absolutely not and they become nothing more than an afterthought as we focus on just one particular collection who are unmemorable.

The script for Asylum just makes things worse. The dialog feels like it was written by someone who hasn’t quite learned that the 80’s are over and when the time comes to identify String as some genius computer hacker, he’s given a lame tag to go along with the trade. Mafia Hacker; what in the hell kind of name is that? Any self-respecting hacker would be embarrassed to use a name like that, and it’s obvious that the screenwriter really knew nothing of hacking much less computers as there are vague terms tossed in to try and make things seem real. The dialog just gets worse particularly from the end of Tommy, Rez, and the doctor himself who we see again as a villain that is meant to be put over as a Freddy clone. He has bad one-liners which I don’t necessarily think were meant to be such and his rants are not creative or something that will induce nightmares. Top it off with some really bad special effects and lighting that makes me think that an Argento film might seem more appealing to sit through and you’ve got yourself one horror film that is beyond forgettable.

There are no special features to be found at all on the DVD. This really shows how much faith there is in a movie of this low caliber. It’s almost like the studio is more concerned with getting it out on the shelves and ultimately, I think they understand that any money that Asylum will make is going to be from rental chains buying mass quantities of it. A no-name horror movie just won’t sell in most cases, and Asylum definitely falls into that category. It’s too bad there are no extras though. I was actually looking forward to hearing the cast, director, or writer go on endlessly about how original this idea was and how it was going to be the horror movie that would scare so many people. That’s been said time and time again, and most of the time it’s nothing more than self-hype which belies what the truth really is.

Asylum is now the new low for the horror industry and it really feels that right now the genre is incapable of picking itself up, wiping off some of the blood, and returning at even half strength. There have been too many movies over the past year or more that have tried to pas themselves off as being the next classic, but so far I haven’t seen any of those. Asylum’s only strong point is that at least it isn’t a remake, at least not in the usual meaning of the word, but this is one time that I think if it were, it might have been a lot better than what is seen here. At least I did find a way to relate though because I’m sure in years to come, I’ll be talking about traumatic experiences with someone and mention, “Yeah, years ago I had to review this horror movie, Asylum . . . . “

- mike -