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Madison has had
a rough life. When she was only a kid
she witnessed her father commit suicide right before
her eyes and one year ago her brother committed
suicide. Now, she's all grown up and headed for
college. Getting friends is no problem but staying
sane may be more difficult than she thought since
her new dorm is in fact an old asylum. Soon enough
strange things start to happen in the dorm and her
new-found friends start disappearing one by one.
From the director of such brilliant movies as Snakes
On a Plane and Final Destination 2 comes this generic
and underwhelming ghost slasher with an even more
generic title. Why on earth would David R. Ellis
agree to direct this movie? It was written by a man
who's only written TV-episodes for shows like "She
Spies" and "The Pretender" before for crying out loud!
Anyway, Asylum is basically a mix between Boogeyman 2
(yes I know it was produced after Asylum) and The House
On Haunted Hill - but not in a good way. It's about
a teenage girl, Madison, who moves into a newly opened
dorm so that she can attend college. She quickly finds
a group of friends and it seems as if things are
finally looking up for her. The friends all have deep
dark secrets however and since the dorm used to be an
asylum where a crazy doctor killed his patients, the
doctor's ghost soon returns to kill them with their
secrets. The past comes back to haunt them more or less.
Asylum is nicely shot, it's got good production values,
an OK cast and at first sight it looks to be a pretty
good movie. Well looks can be deceptive. It's not so
much that the story is bad because I honestly kind of
dug the basic premise, it's the horror aspect that
just doesn't work. It's been done so many times before
and the ghost doctor is just ridiculous. There's no
atmosphere, no suspense, no tension, no nothing.
Furthermore, there are several plot holes to be found
in here and when the movie finally ends we're left
with a bunch of questions, it seems as if David just
gave up after a while and realized that he had made a
bad decision. Now, I know everyone has issues but these
teens all have extremely dark pasts. One was molested
as a child, one was force-fed to become fat as a child,
one watched her father commit suicide as a child, one
has an abusive ex-boyfriend, one was forced to play
with strings and so on... Yep, top-notch stuff.
So anyway, instead of killing them with their worst
fears, the doctor kills them by having them relive
their most horrible moments in life. So it's pretty
much the same thing yeah. I can't say that Asylum was
truly awful though, it had some positive things about
it and it wasn't THAT hard to watch it until the end,
probably due to its production values. It's a bad
movie though and certainly nothing out of the ordinary.
Just another over-ambitious DTV flick and I'm really
disappointed in David R. Ellis for directing this as
I've always expected great things for him. Hopefully
his next movie, Dead Of Night, will be better even
though the title is just as generic. But for now, you
may as well skip Asylum, there's nothing here that
you haven't seen before or that you wish to see again.
A head split in half, needles in the eyes, some gory
stabbings, mildly gory stuff.
I didn't pay much attention to it, it wasn't great,
it wasn't awful.
Asylum is one of those flicks that's so utterly mediocre
that you have a hard time reviewing the film because
there simply wasn't a whole lot to review. It's a bad
movie I'll tell you that and it's nothing we haven't
seen hundreds of times before. A college-oriented ghost
flick - not exactly groundbreaking.
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