About.com Rating

There are a great many subcategories under the wide umbrella of "world and independent films." It can mean bootstrap productions with five figure budgets (see my review of Empire Builder), Oscar-baiting grand-scale foreign language films (In Darkness) or movies with big Hollywood stars and wide releases that still, thanks to a proprietary algorithm devised by your About.com Guides in concert with the RAND Corporation, NASA and the Keebler Elves, can still, somehow, fit the category (The Descendents.)

Still, there's a whole subset that perhaps you feel guilty for ignoring. I know I do. It is the low budget horror flick with no stars. Decades ago it might have been okay to relegate this entire wing of independent filmmaking into an art-free ghetto, but some recent successes make it clear that this is not the case. I cite, off the top of my head, Simon Rumley's Red, White and Blue, the Mexican cannibal chamber piece We Are What We Are and the recent Sundance film Excision as three quite brilliant, brutal movies that I'd happily call important cinema.

IFC Midnight, distributors of two of the name-checked films above, is one of the leading companies offering VOD releases timed with limited theatrical runs, and, I admit, too many of them slip through the cracks. The most recent one is Alexandre Courtes' Asylum Breakout and it's the random spot-check upon which I'm judging this entire business model.

Just joking. I'm not. Because this movie is a stinker.

I come to a movie about lunatics in an insane asylum wreaking bloody havoc with all the good will in the world.

It's a terrific setting and the logline conjures all sorts of painful props to tease out a nice collection of bloody sequences. There are two ways to go with this: horrifyingly realistic or playfully over-the-top.

At first, it appears that Courtes' film will be the latter. A troika of longhair indie rock douches who gig on weekends also happen to work in the kitchen of a giant concrete box for the criminally insane. Their boss is also the head security guard (who seems to be the only other guy who works there) and who threatens all the inmates with physical punishment. Also: the kitchen staff receives shipments of actual, unprocessed food and cooks up giant vats of curry. No, I've never been to an insane asylum, but I know it isn't really like this.

That's okay, though, because it is a movie – and a movie where nutcases are gonna' go on a killing rampage, so I am itching to suspend my disbelief once things start getting fun. The problem is, it never happens. They're playing this one straight. After thirty minutes of getting to know these intensely disinteresting characters (how could you have been late for practice!!) finally the power goes out. Our three hirsute cooks aren't only without hair nets, they are without light and all the locked doors open up.

Again – only an idiot would start shouting “this would never happen!” at the screen, because that person doesn't understand what fiction is all about. But if you are going to present far-fetched situations, do something with it. Courtes has not a drop of Sam Raimi-esque visual flair, or a Drew Goddard-like twist up his sleeve. What he has, instead, is people running around with knives in the dark.

This is the final embarrassment – not only is Asylum Blackout boring, you can't see anything. I guess that's gonna' happen when all the lights go out, right?

The action takes place in corridors and in the big kitchen – nothing with electroshock tables as you may have hoped. When our heroes finally get to a phone to call the cops (to say, hey, people are dead and more murders are coming) we're supposed to buy that “they won't be here for an hour.” No explanation is given why. The only correct response the viewer can give is, “well, tell them I said hi, because I'm not sticking around that long.”

There is one good thing to come from Asylum Blackout, however. You don't have to feel like you are constantly missing gems by ignoring the vast category of quick and dirty indie horror films treleased weekly to VOD. If something is truly good, you'll hear about it.