This review is of the TV-14 edited version of the film. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version would be more negative

When you have a movie by the same guy as the Exorcist you already know that you’re going to be in for a rough time. It’s not exactly a vote of confidence right? Well, this one definitely manages to live up to the Exorcist’s legacy so you will want to stay far away from this one. It’s definitely not a movie that you will want to stick around for. You’ll have checked out at least 9 times during it!

The movie starts off with introducing us to a castle where the government has made a safe space for veterans who have gone crazy after their time in battle. Their PTSD and delusions act up in many different ways such as amnesia or complete changes in personality. The place allows the inmates to have the run of the place and they just have guards on the outside to make sure nobody escapes. This does seem rather dangerous and while the idea is probably that they’re all good people who have all just gone a little mad…that’s a pretty big risk. Hudson has been sent over here to be the new head of the place. He will be a doctor who can bring some order to this place but is he up to the job?

I think the most tragic part about this film is that the opening minutes aren’t terrible. We get a solid fakeout in the beginning where a doctor introduces himself to Hudson and they have a reasonable conversation only for the dialogue to start getting weirder and weirder. Well, it turns out that the “doctor” was another insane patient who just thought he was one and the guy gets taken away. It was actually a really solid gag and set things off on the right track. See, the opening of the film is actually more of a comedy with the whole place being rather wacky and silly.

Yeah you could say there are some dark undercurrents here since these people have lost their minds which is really tragic but the film is playing it off in this rather odd way. Like I mentioned, the patients are allowed to do whatever they want so there will be scenes where they storm into the room to talk about painting, movies, drama, etc. Their conversations end up going in circles and don’t really have a point to them. Of course that in itself is the point. It’s a bit on the dull side but it’s mostly inoffensive. I’d probably give the first half like a solid 4 or something like that.

Then things take a turn when the film decides to get real dark and edgy. It all leads up to one of the inmates managing to escape only he ends up going to a really seedy bar where a gang has full control of it. Evidently they have had control of this place for a very long time from how everyone is acting. It’s so close to the army base that you’d figure some soldiers would have gone there during breaks or something right? Maybe they just never noticed or didn’t even care since there wasn’t much reaction to the truck in the opening scene.

Unfortunately the whole exchange is the definition of a film killer. It lasts forever and has the villains getting away with too much. They’re up against a soldier whose mind has been fried for a long time so he’s not able to fight back at all and he’s horribly outnumbered anyway. After he’s tortured for a while, Hudson comes in and then the same thing happens to him. They have him debase himself for a while and by the time he gets up and begins his big Shonen Jump comeback, it’s just way too late to care.

When you have the hero losing, you have to make sure you don’t overplay your hand. You need him to start fighting back while there are still things to fight for and before the villains have had their full laughs. The film really mistimed this and had Hudson put up with way too much. The whole thing doesn’t work and I would argue that even accounting for all of the twists in the movie it doesn’t work. Hudson had shown some aggression in an earlier scene when someone was just grabbing an inmate. Here, way worse things are happening and he doesn’t take that same tone/approach?

He had a security guard be afraid of him during one of the earlier scenes because of how intense Hudson got. So the fact that this didn’t happen here was very disappointing. The film wanted to show just how evil the outside world could be but ended up falling into the issue of too much show rather than tell. If you cut the scene in half and have Hudson start fighting way earlier then it would have gone a long way. Unfortunately the film doesn’t stop there. Hudson’s overall climax after this is definitely real bad.

Ironically his moment is supposed to show the moment of human goodness that the inmate was looking for but i would argue that it doesn’t work. It’s misguided at best and ultimately is never the way to go. There are much better ways to prove that. In fact, fighting off a bunch of villains to save your friend would already be a rather solid moment if you ask me. Choosing a certain method to shock the guy back into reality is definitely not what I would choose. So while the film goes for a happy ending approach in the end, it ended up being more on the sad side if you ask me. There was a whole lot of damage done to the characters here and by the end they’ve lost at least as much as they have gained, if not more.

So far films about insane asylums don’t tend to have a good track record. They tend to be rather crazy the whole time with a whole lot of issues. Either the inmates start to get mistreated all the time or they turn evil and start murdering people. I’m still waiting for a wholesome adventure where the inmates are all cured and the whole process is a lot of fun rather than it being all dark and dreary. The odds of this likely won’t be great though because to an extent it does go against the whole point of taking place in an asylum.

Overall, There are some pretty solid plot twists here that end up getting overshadowed by the film’s failings. Hudson’s character was handled well aside from the bar scene and the gag at the beginning that I mentioned was really good. In general the writing and dialogue were reasonable in the first half. Keeping everyone in the asylum would have been the film’s best bet. I don’t think there was going to be many easy ways to fight off the fact that the film could be rather boring but trying to go the edgy approach really didn’t work. So in the end I would say to definitely give this one a skip.

Overall 0/10