Hospitals and asylums always have been great settings for horror-flicks. You can very rarely go wrong with it, though it's simply true as well that once you have seen one of those movies you'll find all of the other ones to be just alike.
And as far as the genre goes; this one really doesn't stand out. As a matter of fact, it's a pretty failed attempt, mostly. The fact that Lance Henriksen is being an high billed actor on this movie should already tell you enough. I love that guy but the movies he does normally aren't of the highest caliber and just don't have the highest budget or most talented people involved with them.
Reason why this movie just didn't work for me was because it failed at to create a decent atmosphere, of paranoia, claustrophobia and just overall madness. Instead the movie was more focusing on being a slick looking, typical, modern horror-flick, with lots of flashing images and quick cuts and some very clichéd characters.
Because the atmosphere is lacking, so is the tension of the movie already. But it gets made even worse by the movie its total lack of imagination and creativity, when it comes down to its horror moments. It's one of those movies that rely heavily on false scares and it aren't even well done false scare either.
But another obvious cause of all the movie is problems is simply the story. I'm sorry, I just couldn't care about anything happening in it. There is a mystery but you literally have no idea what it is all about, until half way through the movie, or so, but even then you are still trying to figure out which direction the movie is heading toward. The one moment its heading toward a more supernatural story, while at others its more a straight-forward, horror-slasher. It sounds like a good thing that the movie its mystery and story are so unpredictable but in truth the reason why its being so unpredictable is because it's a quite big mess and the story is very often just all over the place. It will make you loose interest pretty fast and just don't care to find out what this big 'mystery' is. It also just doesn't seem like anything life threatening or something that could solve some problems or help people out. It's a mystery that seems and feels totally irrelevant and it's not really an interesting subject for a movie, which I admit is also largely due to the messy way the whole story and movie presents itself.
Also the 'twist' just didn't do it for me. I know every genre movie tries to be original, by often adding a twist ending but when it isn't in style and tone with the rest of the movie and it really doesn't connect too well with the rest of the story that got set up previously, your twist just doesn't work out too well and it feels more like a cheap way to surprise your audience.
There are still far more worse movies to watch out there and the movie didn't annoyed me too much, despite of all its mess and ineffective approach. But it's obviously hardly a movie that I would recommend to anyone.
5/10
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