When his brother is wrongfully imprisoned, Wentworth Miller hatches a plan to….um, no, wait, that’s ‘Prison Break’. When his suicidal sister (Kiele Sanchez) is sent to the nuthouse (mum was a nutter, so sis thinks she’s got the crazies too), and no one will let him see her, young Jesse Metcalfe goes all Jack Nicholson, pretending to be nuts so he gets himself put in the same institution as his sister (huh?), in the hopes of busting her out of her high security ward. Fat chance when the insane asylum is being run by crazy doctor Peter Stormare, who conducts bizarre experiments on patients that turn them into psychotropically-affected, mentally insane flesh-eaters. Kevin Sussman and Armin Shimerman play a couple of nutters, one twitchy and benevolent, the other a wannabe Hannibal Lecter (Shimerman ain’t no Tony Hopkins, that’s fer sure!). Carla Gallo is Stormare’s strangely sexy assistant.
Still, Stormare was born to play a mad doctor, and the film actually manages to have its plot unfold slowly yet without any confusion/irritation. Metcalfe tries hard in a more ambitious role than I have seen him in until now. In fact, most of the performances are pretty competent (Gallo is awful, and as I said, Shimerman just doesn’t cut it), it’s just that the story isn’t interesting or remotely original. The best thing in the film (aside from Lisa Arturo’s funbags, the best I’ve seen in a movie all year!) is its ‘Dawn of the Dead’-style ending.
OVERALL SUMMARY
No amount of weird angles or trippy ‘Butterfly Effect’ techniques employed by Buhler can compensate for an uninteresting and clichéd story. A little more humour might’ve helped, though, not to mention a little more horror in the first half of the film.
