Dark Asylum

Just to give an example of how poorly directed this piece of junk is: when Larry Drake is trying to escape from a straightjacket while chained to a chair, the close shots of him tearing out the seams of the straightjacket are backgrounded with Foley sound of him kicking the strut between the chair's legs - and yet he remains perfectly still! (Just try kicking the legs of a chair that you're sitting on and see if you can stay still, no matter how heavy you are - ludicrous.) Larry Drake, in the usual hackneyed role of serial killer-as-superman is badly miscast. Not to be weight-ist, but he is far too heavy to pull off the role convincingly. The film tries, for example, through shoddy editing techniques, to make us believe that a man as overweight as he is can outrun a bunch of cops. It looks so absurd that it's not even laughable. Actually everybody in this movie moves WAY too slowly. It's one of those films where the bad guy staggeringly advances on his victim while the victim, as yet uninjured and otherwise unimpaired, flounders on the floor, trying to scuttle away but managing instead to conveniently back into a wall, all the while yelling, "Nooooo! Please - aaaargh!" (Sort of like my reaction to this cinematic garbage.)

Well, I can truly say that this is the worst movie I ever seen in my entire life!! I never saw a movie with such terrible acting!!!!! I have no idea how this film made it on DVD or Video! The only nice part about the film was Judd Nelson. He was the ONLY person who acted average. I got pretty tired of the Trasher's low vocabulary! ("Give me the key", "Where is the key") So, don't go see this movie!!! You'll be very disappointed!!!

Okay, I didn't expect much from this movie. No big names, except for Larry Drake (when was the last time he was in something decent?), and Pauline Porizkova (Ric Ocasek's SO). Your typical idiot plot (everybody acts like an idiot otherwise the movie would be over in about 5 minutes), your unstoppable loonie, your designated victims. Refreshing change in that we didn't have to listen to the loonie babble endlessly. However, the big oddity is the implicit message: sane people are stupid, ineffectual, weak, and incompetent. Crazies, on the other hand, are cunning, tough, brutally strong, and endure gunshots with only minor annoyance. This is seen not only in our unstoppable villain, but also in the sympathetic, supportive nutcase who aids our heroine. It is even seen (albeit briefly) in our heroine herself, who has her sanity repeatedly questioned when she starts behaving with some sense of self-preservation. Add in the coffee-swilling, donut scarfing cops and you have 90 minutes of stupidity you won't want to watch sober.

When the serial killer The Trasher (Larry Drake) is accidentally captured by the police, he is sent to a deactivated asylum for psychological evaluation. The psychiatrist Maggie (Paulina Porizkova) is called for the evaluation, but The Trasher escapes from the safety room, and stays prisoned in the place, locked in a wing of the old building with Maggie and Quitz (Judd Nelson), a patient that works as janitor. The Trasher tries to escape before the arrival of the FBI agents in charge of transferring him to a prison, and Maggie and Quitz fight for survival, in a game of cat and mouse.

"Dark Asylum" is horrible, indeed a piece of crap. The story is ridiculous, and the character of Maggie is one of the most imbeciles I have ever seen on the screen. Only a top fashion model, who believes that can act, to accept such a ridiculous role. The scenes where the lunatic that works as janitor advises her to have common sense is one of the saddest, in the ridiculous sense, that I have ever seen. The lines are outrageously silly and the behavior of Maggie, as a psychiatrist, is unbelievable. This film is a complete waste of priceless time and money. I do not understand how a user can recommend this crap, and repeat the review and the advice many times, misleading other readers (like me). My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Hospício Maldito" ("Damned Asylum")

It's sounds interesting with the concept, but the execution is poorly done. There's barely any story other than the main character trying to figure out how to escape from the locked up asylum with a Madman inside. It does have a decent build-up with the madman introduction and how deadly he is. But most of the movie is just the characters trying to escape while surviving against the villain. The movie has a pacing issue with the suspenseful scenes happening too quickly to have tension in it and is predictable to guess what happened next. Also, there's not that much happened in the movie to make it interesting or enjoyable to watch throughout because it's mostly just the same things. The characters try to find ways to escape or fight back, but it ends up being a failure. The climax itself isn't that bad because it's somewhat suspenseful, but the characters don't make the best decisions.