Beautiful young student Madison enrols at the Richard Miller University, where her brother committed suicide only the year before. This is not the only bad memory she has, as her mentally sick father shot himself in front of her and her brother when they were only young. The wing of the university in which she will reside is on the site of an old asylum run by the notoriously cruel Doctor Burke, who conducted hideous experiments on his ‘patients’, resulting on them turning on him. The small group of students Madison befriends have their own hang-ups too, and the spectre of Burke knows just how to return them to their most vulnerable moments...

I had high hopes for this film, but the main problem is that is suffers badly from a lack of cohesion. For anyone, like myself, who enjoys intelligent, plot-driven horror, Asylum will come as a big disappointment. It contains holes you could drive a truck through - at best it will leave you with a head full of questions. For instance, for what reason does Burke return from the dead? He isn’t continuing his experiments, only tormenting and killing new students. But to what end? How has he been able to collect the souls of past patients and current students? There’s no inference that Burke is in any way supernatural, aside from the fact that he’s returned in spectral form, of course. And if he’s haunting his old stamping ground, then why does he follow the surviving students outside?

These loose plot threads reduce the film to a mere run-around. In other words, the perpetrator could be anyone with a knife. Even the characters start out well but soon fall into the stereotypical trap. This is less than average stuff.

3

Ty Power