The Institute

I was genuinely disappointed. This then annoyed me....because, well I rather like James Franco. His role in 127 hrs was quite sublime. But in this? I'm still not even sure what this was. It felt like a rather disjointed medley consisting of a ridiculous plot, followed by some horrendous acting and they then thought they could mask it by using unnecessary nudity throughout (and I love nudity! So coming from me, that is a shocker!) but all joking aside, I have to be honest and say, it was just awful.

If I had to guess, it is probably because James Franco fans watched it because he was in it, without knowing what to expect, and were unpleasantly surprised. It wasn't a terrible movie. It had been a while since I've watched it but the only reason I'm even on the IMDb page is because I was thinking about downloading it again to watch it with my wife (who doesn't like scary movies, but does like movies about crazy people, go figure) and she wanted to read some reviews. After reading the reviews, and then us downloading it and watching the movie anyway, I decided that I had to come back to let people know, I enjoyed it the second time, and my wife loved the movie (she wanted me to give it a 9) so I guess, make up your own mind. All I know is, the 4.0 rating doesn't do it justice!

Hammy acting from renowned actors you'd expect more of. It wasn't laudanum they were ingesting but copious amounts of lithium to numb the brain thus restraining the urge to burst out laughing at every cliched, hackneyed and redundant theme in the plot line.

I hope I hammered that home.

Wow. For the life of me, I cannot find anything about this film I liked. With a cast that should have done so much better, we have to lay blame to the awful script and terrible direction. It looked like a made for TV film from the 80s with its soft focus and glaring backlight. It's apparent thriller theme was wanting and any mention of horror or scares is mistaken. I would suspect that this could be used for GCSE media students on how not to make a film.

Some of the worst acting I think I've ever witnessed.