But you can eject!
Either Madison wears blinkers or Asylum is a very lazy horror movie. The fact is that within 15 minutes of moving to a new campus she has already met everyone that she will ever meet or speak to over the next 90 excrutiating minutes; the creepy handyman, the talkative security guard, the scruffy but handsome rebel, the nerd, the slut, the beefcake doofus, the best friend and the dorm monitor. She’s also managed to fit in a horrific death vision.
Big first day.
By nightfall the six students are firm friends, despite most of them being obnoxious and/or aggravating. No-one ever thinks to talk to other guys n gals or make new friends. It’s like they all sit quietly somewhere waiting for Madison to show up before spouting inanities and biding time before the Big Reveal.
They don’t have to wait long (even though to me it felt like eternity) because that very night they learn that this campus has a ‘no go zone’, an entire wing that was once a juvenile mental asylum run by a lunatic doctor named Burke who perpetrated all kinds of atrocities on young people before his dastardly methods were finally made public.
But that was so long ago, decades in fact, and Burke is long since dead. For some reason that hasn’t given the school enough time for the school to clean up his offices, because that night the kids break in and find everything just as it was left.
They read a couple of ominous sounding reports, nearly get sprung by security, and giggle their stupid heads back to their rooms to think about what a naughty guy the Evil Doctor Burke must have been.
What these kids didn’t know – aside from how to make a semi credible horror movie – is that Burke ain’t finished curing, even after half a century of decomposing. And it is rapidly apparent that Burke wants to cure in ironic ways. While it might seem admirable that this long dead murderer takes the time to analyse the individual before coming up with a death sequence tailored to their fears. It is carried out with such incompetence that you won’t feel the need to applaud.
And should it be a concern to young Madison that her father and brother both suicided? I mean what with that ironic killer roaming the halls?
Asylum is yet another loathsome and lazy teen horror film based around a flimsy premise.
It has abhorrent characters that aren’t meant to be abhorrent, flimsy setpieces and a horrendous case of CGI used in lieu of genuine gore.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. Asylum might be R rated, but despite that it is a scare and entertainment free zone.
