Asylum of the Damned

Here we go again...This week's slasher(which may not actually BE a slasher...I won't know until we watch it!) is something called Asylum of the Damned. That title pretty much sums up my entire existence. But enough about me...let's get ready for SPOILERS!

The movie begins in what I assume is the asylum, during s violent storm. A guy in a white coat is running down a corridor, as something appears to be chasing him. When he stops at a secure door to fumble with a keycard, whatever was looking for him catches up. He screams at a security camera that he's not crazy, but the office where the monitor is located looks empty.

The lab coat guy is then somehow subdued, and brought into what looks like a lab. He's been strapped onto a table, and his mouth has been taped shut by his attacker. Oh, and his tongue was removed, which seems like overkill if you're going to just gag the guy. A large winged demon with red eyes looms over the poor guy, and little bolts of energy pass through its claws as it waves the claw over the victim's face. Then the title screen pops up.

The movie then whisks us away to a tiny house, where we see a young couple talking before heading off to work. The wife gives her husband, a medical student, a medal of St. Christopher, to encourage him on his first day at work in a certain ASYLUM OF THE DAMNED!!!! The clasp on the medallion breaks, but he puts it in his pocket, promising her that he'll fix it later.

When he gets into his car, he finds a book that his wife left on the seat for him, by some doctor named McCort. He drives down a deserted highway, and a wolf howls at one point. I don't want to criticize the guy, but shouldn't his commute to work take less than a day? Not only does he need to stop for gas at one point, but night has fallen.

The gas station seems abandoned, so our young doctor tries to yell for attention. A stranger leaps at the young doctor, then a  creepy-looking old man looms up behind him, demanding to know why he didn't  just ring the bell for service, as opposed to shouting. While pumping the gas, the old man explains that the other man who ran off was a guy who sometimes wanders out of the mental hospital. He's supposedly harmless, but we'll see...After paying for the gas, the doctor resumes his journey.

When he finally gets to the mental hospital, we finally discover that our protagonist is named Dr. Bishop. He meets a security guard outside, and the guard offers to escort him to his boss, Dr. Francis, who is currently in the Isolation Ward. Along the way, Bishop is told a little bit about the history of the facility. The place is massive, but only holds about 600 patients. At the end of the tour, the guard introduces himself as Frank, then instructs Dr. Bishop on how to get to the Isolation Ward.

Dr. Bishop heads down a shadowy hallway, and finds a number of patients staring out at him from their rooms. Then he hears the sound of a muffled cry behind one door, and a greasy-looking doctor named Peter Francis advises him to step away. Dr. Francis shows Bishop where his new office will be.

In the cramped office, things start to get a little bit bizarre. Doctor Francis pushes Dr. Bishop onto an office chair, then asks him if he believes that Satan is real. As he rants and raves that the patients in the facility are all evil, someone can be heard attempting to enter the office. After Francis shares the idea that all of the patients are damned souls, another doctor steps in, calmly injecting him with a hypodermic.

The new man is Dr. McCort, the person that Bishop was supposed to meet. It's soon revealed that Dr. Francis was actually tied up and gagged by a delusional serial killer by the name of Harry Smith. Dr. Bishop could have very likely become his next victim, if Dr. McCort hadn't have shown up just then.

The 2 men have a casual interview, and get to know one another over some coffee. McCort sees the medallion around Bishop's neck(Uh, did he fix that broken clasp when I was blinking?), then shows off his own holy item, a ring with a strange symbol engraved on it. He doesn't explain what it means, so I'm willing to bet that it'll be important later.

After a more thorough tour of some of the patient wards, Bishop is introduced to Helen, and Wells, 2 of the main nurses in charge of the dangerous patients in "A" ward. While Dr. McCort gets a report from the nurses, Bishop decides to talk to one of the patients, an elderly black man who is tied to the bed that he's in. He begs Dr. Bishop to loosen the straps on his arms, claiming  that he and the other patients are being tortured and used as human sacrifices in some kind of dark ritual.

After they head back toward the administration area, Dr. Bishop requests that he be assigned to the patients in A ward. Dr. McCort agrees, but only if he agrees to live at the asylum full-time, at least to start. Bishop agrees, then rushes home to tell his wife that he'd literally rather live in a mental hospital, than be with her.

Dr. Bishop helps the now-unemployed Dr. Francis pack up his office, then he gets some instructions on dispensing medications from the head nurse, Helen. She makes him a promise that all of the pertinent files on his new patients will be delivered to his room, and he soon finds himself overwhelmed by paperwork.

After a restless night, Bishop organizes the patient files, and kills several dozens of cockroaches in his office. Then he meets Smithy, a hulking brute of an orderly, who also happens to be blind. A blind orderly, in a ward for the criminally insane. That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is absolute genius.

Smithy escorts Bishop to the shower area, where he has his first official session as a doctor, with a patient by the name of Jackson. Sadly, Jackson is dead, an apparent murder victim. Bishop discovers him in aa therapy tub, with massive wounds all over his chest.

Bishop tries to call the cops to report the murder, but Dr. McCort stops him before he can complete the call. He tells the younger man that the best thing that they can do for the patients is to just keep them heavily sedated. He also sees the facility as a personal crusade, calling it his "destiny".

Bishop talks to his wife from his office(Yup, back in the day, we had to go where phones were in order to call folks!), and he promises her that they can someday have a more stable life at a regular hospital. Then he sees a death threat written in blood above his desk.

At breakfast, Bishop asks Smithy where he could locate a custodian to clean up his ceiling. The blind orderly tells him that there's an older patient by the name of Que, and that he does most of the janitorial duties. Also, according to Smithy, the only people that have keys to that office are Bishop and McCort. Hmmmm....

Que swings by the office, verifies that the message was written in actual blood, then he tells Bishop that he reminds him of a previous doctor by the name of Kloves. Kloves died under mysterious circumstances, leading Bishop to ask Que if there were any similarities between him and the manner in which Jackson died. Que doesn't know,but he says that Jackson was into some weird cult activity.

Bishop talks to one of the patients in "A" ward, and discovers that the man was awake the night that Jackson died. He says that a couple of employees took Jackson to the basement, and that people who go to the basement always wind up dead. Before Bishop can get any further details, the nurse tells him that Dr. McCort needs to see him about an urgent matter.

Dr. McCort pretty much just wanted to bitch and moan about all of the trouble Bishop is causing with his investigations. He orders Bishop to simply do the bare minimum to help the patients, and nothing more. If not, then he threatens to destroy Bishop's future as a doctor.

Later, Que shows Bishop that he was able to clean most of the blood away from the ceiling. They talk, and Que tells the doctor that he was committed after he stabbed a little girl to death. Que is troubled by the memory, and he admits that he thinks that he has something evil inside himself that made him kill her. After Que leaves, Bishop finds a note on his desk, asking him for a meeting later, in the boiler room.

The sender of the note is Mark, the patient who saw Jackson the night he was killed. He convinced one of the nurses to undo his straps for a short break, so he arranged for the meeting in the boiler room. He warns Bishop that someone at the hospital is killing patients, but he doesn't know who it is, nor does he know their motive. He warns Bishop to be careful about who he trusts.

After seeing and hearing Smithy being verbally abused by evil Nurse Helen, Bishop finds a patient invading his office. It's Hadley, the man who frightened him at the gas station, and he reveals that he has a skeleton key for the entire hospital. Hadley tells Bishop that he works on bodies in the morgue, cleaning them up. When asked if he knows about the condition of Jackson's corpse, he says that he doesn't know how the bodies get so badly damaged.

Bishop then visits the kindly Nurse Wells. She was the one left the bloody message in his office, in an attempt to scare him into quitting. She can't tell him anything else, out of fear that someone might hear her and then try to kill her, but she suggests that Bishop might find some answers in the file room. Intrigued, Bishop decides to have a look, and he forces Hadley to tag along.

Bishop locates the files of the deceased staff members and patients, and realizes that all of them supposedly died from heart attacks. The evil nurse Helen then comes into the room, so Bishop hides under a table. For some reason, this actually works.

He waits until the coast is clear, leaves the file room, then has Hadley take him to the morgue. They travel through a maze of tunnels, stopping once so that Hadley can show Bishop the secret passage he uses when he escapes. Then they arrive at the morgue, where there are about 3 or 4 bodies, all with the strange chest wounds and markings on the bodies,  and a drug that causes heart attacks laying around nearby.

Bishop recognizes one of the corpses as Mark, who actually wakes up. He begs the men to rescue him, but they hide, mere moments before a couple of men in hooded white robes enter the morgue. Hadley whispers to Bishop that the bodies are being delivered to an area used for human sacrifices.

The opening scene plays again, only this time the demon is just a guy in a robe wearing a cheesy-looking white mask. Wait, no, the demon's there as well, standing with the Fake Jason Voorhees. Fake Jason sees a glint of metal on the ground while the demon is electrocuting one of the victims, and recognizes the medal that Bishop was wearing earlier. A chase begins!

Hadley and Bishop get away, but Hadley refuses to go any further. He lets Bishop keep the skeleton key, and the doctor rushes to gather up some incriminating files and escape the premises. Before that can happen, Bishop is interrupted by Smithy, who tells him that he has a female visitor waiting in the cafeteria.

It's the wife/girlfriend/whatever. She's being questioned by Dr. McCort when Bishop walks into the room. McCort manages to manipulate her into spending the night, then he sees the files that Bishop took. As Bishop hurries to escort his beloved away from the evil doctor, McCort taunts him by revealing that he found the medallion. D'oh!

Bishop drags his wife to the nearest exit, but his security card suddenly won't work. Then McCort pops up, He makes up a story about the electricity in the building not working properly, and Bishop warns him not to try to hurt them. McCort tells the confused love interest that Bishop has started to exhibit signs of madness himself, brought on by the stress of dealing with so many new patients and challenges, in such a short time.

They escort their new prisoners to an isolation ward, where Smithy has been told to expect them. As McCourt reveals that Nurse Wells has also been captured, Smithy suddenly attacks the security guard, then pushes McCourt into the nearest cell. He helps our young heroes escape, leading them down another endless maze of corridors.

They end up in a badly lit room, and Smithy wanders away to find a light switch. When the lights come on, they realize that they've wandered back into the morgue, and the girlfriend screams when she sees the mutilated bodies around her. An alarm light begins flashing, and Bishop realizes that they need to hurry to the escape tunnel if they don't want to die.

McCort and evil nurse Helen are busy scouring the halls for the escapees, who have reached a dead end instead of the tunnel. Luckily Hadley shows up, and he offers to show them the right path. Just as they arrive, Bishop realizes that he somehow managed to leave behind all of the evidence. What na freakin' putz this guy is! He actually decides to go back for the files, but tells his wife to escape with Hadley and Smithy. Dumbass.

Bishop runs back down the hallways, and Dr. McCort ambushes him. When Bishop regains his senses, McCort is preparing him for the arrival of the demon, which will harvest his soul and bring it back to Satan. The demon is summoned, then McCort turns to grab the syringe needed to make it look like Bishop died from a heart attack.

Somebody knocks the evil doctor out cold! Oh, Bishop's wife returned to help him. She unties Bishop, and they leave McCort there for the demon to feed on. The evil doctor tries to crawl away, but the creature kills him.

After they escape, Bishop gets the cops and an ambulance to meet them in the parking lot. The cops ask Bishop to answer some more questions, while the love interest waits in the ambulance. Too late, Bishop sees the evil  Nurse Helen driving the ambulance, and the pair of cops also appear to be part of the cult.

The film ends in a hospital room, where Bishop is screaming for help from a bed. A young nurse tries to calm him down, and an elderly doctor arrives to meet Bishop. He dismisses the pretty nurse, then reveals that he's part of the cult as well, as growling noises are heard from a nearby demon somewhere offscreen. THE END

Well...eh. It did have an interesting concept, granted, but there were holes in the plot big enough for that demon to stomp through. I mean, what happened to Hadley and Smithy, for example? What would be the point of the cult existing if their leader was dead, since he was the only one who could summon the demon? Wouldn't it have been easier to simply fire Bishop early on, destroy the evidence, THEN discredit him in the medical community? I mean, that HAS to be easier than trying to hide an ever-growing list of dead bodies! 2 killer trees out of 5, for at least not making me fall asleep.

And what did I learn from Asylum of the Damned?

-Some guys are willing to go a loooooong way to commute to work!

-Blind guys are commonly trusted to handle mental patients.

-When summoning a demon, try to make your sacrifices look like they died of heart attacks, even if you don't ever plan to let anyone see the bodies of your victims. Yeah, and amke the explanation really elaborate and dumb.

Next up on my queue: the delightfully kooky alien-in-an-underwater-lab movie Deepstar Six. It was one of several movies that all came out within a year or 2 of each other, about people being killed by water-monsters. Weird trend. Also, sometime soon, I have the cult classic All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which is also now on Netflix Instant. Cool! See you soon!

Dark Floors

Well, now that we've all survived Thanksgiving(barely...I feel like I might burst at any second!), let's finish the week with some leftover turkey. But which one? If you recall, Netflix sent me 2 scary movies, one about a group of people in a haunted hospital(Dark Floors), and the other about some partying kids being killed by a pinata(Pinata: Survival Island).

Well, after flipping a coin and getting my meenie's eenied, I went with Dark Floors. I figured I needed some distance between Doll Graveyard and my next "inanimate object kills people" movie(heh, next week...), so that left a clear winner in the battle for my attention. So, put down your utensils, skip the last piece of pumpkin pie, and let's get this turkey SPOILED!

Okay, opening credits: somebody's drawing all over my screen, with a red crayon. Apparently, some kind of hard-rockin' band named Lordi made this film. And I think they're Swedish or something, because the names of the film's crew all look like they're hard to pronounce.

Anyway, the first scene is of a young girl in an MRI machine. She looks scared, and she's mumbling "not again" over and over. From an observation room, we see the girl's father, a nurse and a doctor watching her brain activity on some monitors. Her father asks if the test is hurting her, but the doctor assures him that the machine doesn't inflict pain.

The girl seems to fall asleep, then she regains consciousness with a sudden jolt. As she starts to scream and demand a red crayon, the MRI has a power surge. The lights flicker, then the machine starts to smoke. Boy, this would be fun to watch if you had surgery the next day, huh?

So now we finally learn a few names. The young girl is Sarah, and her father is Ben. The nurse is Emily, and the doctor doesn't get a name. That either means he's the first to die, or he gets to live. Eh.

Ben rescues Sarah from the equipment before she gets burned, then plops her into a wheelchair. He gives her the red crayon, then threatens to take his daughter to a different hospital. Maybe one where crap doesn't explode at random intervals? Doctor Anonymous and Emily try to calm him down, and we find out that Sarah is autistic. They've been studying her case for quite some time, but have never come to any definitive conclusions.

As Ben tucks Sarah back into her hospital bed, a storm rages outside. Sarah still seems agitated, and ske keeps saying, "not again", even after her father backs away. At some point during the night, Ben wakes her up, after deciding to take his daughter to a different hospital.

They get as far as the elevator, then Sarah starts to ramble about her crayons again. The noise gets the attention of the staff, and Nurse Emily asks Ben to reconsider moving his daughter. As Ben backs the wheelchair into the elevator, Sarah grabs the wall.

Emily gets on the elevator with them, as well as a businessman on a phone, a security guard, and an elderly man who looks homeless. The elevator descends toward the lobby, then grinds to a halt after the seventh floor. As the lights go out again, one of the characters mutters, "Not 6, not 7. Not Hell, and not Heaven." Oooh, symbolism!

The homeless man, Tobias, looks like he passed out, so the security guy tries to revive him. When that doesn't work, Emily steps in to assess his condition. She advises them to call for further assistance, but no one has a working phone anymore.

The security guy, Rick, tries the emergency call button in the elevator. No response from that, either. Eventually it works, but all he hears is his own voice. While that's going on, Emily tries to save Tobias with CPR. When he finally starts to breath again, the power also seems to come back on. Tobias stands up, then demands to know why they didn't let him die.

The elevator doors finally open up, but the corridor is empty. No nurses, no janitorial staff, the place is like a museum. Even the patients have deserted the area. Rick suggests that there might have been a fire drill or something, so they wander off to find the nearest stairwell. As the walk away, Sarah eyes a suspicious shadow lurking behind an office door. Hmmm...

At an intersection in the hallway, Ben stops the group to listen to something. It's a machine, and it's in a room right next to them. Rick opens the door, and they discover that a copy machine was left on. Emily examines a few of the images that came through, revealing a screaming mouth.

Emily tells Ben that it's almost time to give his daughter a dose of some new medication they've been testing. It helps control seizures, but is still very experimental. Then they all hear another mysterious sound.

It's a woman in a wheelchair, and she's stuck in a corner. The sound was caused by her repeatedly whacking the chair into the wall. Rick offers to help her, but a closer inspection reveals that she's dead. Oh, and it looks like her eyes were torn out of their sockets.

Tobias starts to flip out, so they cover the corpse's face. Then Rick tries a nearby intercom, but hears only his own message coming back to him. Technology and this hospital don't seem to get along...Oh, and as they continue the search for a way out, we see that Sarah was drawing the face of the eyeless woman. Nice touch.

They manage to find the emergency stairs, but that whole area seems to be covered in mold and fungus. They begin their descent to the ground floor, with Ben carrying his daughter, and Rick lugging around the wheelchair. Great, I guess I have time to grow a beard...

A noise from one of the levels beneath them brings the procession, and the movie to a grinding halt. As they glance over the railing, a gun goes off. No one is killed, but Rick gets nicked around his jawline. It's just my luck to pick a movie with no body count.

They all scurry out of the stairwell at the fifth floor, and hide in the nearest open room. After making sure that the door can't be opened by their attacker, Rick has his small wound examined by Emily. As they all make an effort to calm down, heavy thudding sounds are heard moving toward their location. Everybody stares at the blocked door, with the exception of Sarah. She's glancing nervously at a pair of double-doors at the far end of the room.

As they all debate whether or not they should try the stairs again, Tobias watches Sarah wheel herself quietly over to the other exit. They all decide to follow her. Sure, why not?

They come to a security station, where Rick turns on a series of monitors. They realize, as each monitor powers up, that the entire hospital is empty, as if the building has been abandoned. The phones are still dead, yet the lights and intercom system work just fine.

Speaking of the intercom, Jon(the irritable businessman) decides to use it. He call for help from anyone who can hear the message, then gives out their location. Yeah, someone just tried to shoot you, so you should tell them exactly where you are. Jon's a brilliant strategist.

The other pretty much tell him the same thing, and Sarah looks over at another set of doors. Then the nurse sees something on one of the screens: a couple walking around on the third floor. When they walk offscreen, the monitor fritzes out. Actually, they all do.

Sarah wheels herself to a point directly in front of the doorway she was watching, and the doors seem to open under the power of her gaze. The others discuss their next move, and seem to disagree about just what that should be. Emily thinks that the priority should be to figure out where everyone else went, while Rick just wants to keep heading to the exit. Uh, why can't y'all do both?

They notice that Sarah's gone again, and conduct a search. C'mon, she's an autistic child confined to a wheelchair....tie a freakin' bell to her, if you have this much trouble! Before they leave the security station, Ben grabs a pair of walkie-talkies to bring along. Tobias wordlessly points him to the door she passed through.

Sarah's chair is in the middle of the hallway, and she looks like she might be sleeping. As Ben moves closer, he sees a ghastly female phantom reflected in the window of another door, but she swiftly vanishes again. He rescues Sarah, then rejoins the group.

Emily knows that Ben was spooked by something, but he won't talk about the apparition. Then a television and a portable radio both turn on at the same time, and 2 messages are heard: "There's no time like the present" and "...and it's gonna get colder and colder". As they ponder what it all means, Jon's phone rings.

He answers it, but it's just a recorded "out of service" message. The same thing happens to Emily and Ben when their phones go off. Sarah stops drawing to cover her ears, and Tobias decides to follow suit. As nutty as he is, he seems to be the smartest adult in the film.

There's a high-pitched whistle, and the glass in the television begins to crack, as do some of the windows. That female ghost appears again, and she's got the forehead of a Klingon. Rick fires a gun at her, shattering the glass, but leaving the spirit unaffected.

She grins, then emits a sonic shriek, which breaks even more glass around them. They flee down the hall, seeking refuge in the stairwell again. As they relax, the spirit finds them again, leading to a silly, slo-mo chase back into the hall. How is it possible that so many of these things devolve into ridiculous Scooby-Doo episodes?

The banshee swoops closer, raising her hands like talons, and someone accidentally backs into a control panel. An X-ray turns on, and the radiation it emits causes the spirit to disappear. See? Something in that hospital DID work!

Tobias is confronted by Ben, who wants to know how he predicted that the sound would happen before it did. Tobias turns the accusation back on him, wondering if stuff like this has happened in their family before that day. Jon, always the helpful one, thinks that it's just kind of hallucination, possibly brought on by a gas leak.

As the others scoff at him, Jon decides that he's better off on his own. He leaves the group to find his own escape route, and Emily says that they should do the same. The Amazing Race: Hallway Edition begins!

Jon tries to find a signal on his phone, then strolls down a corridor. He comes to an elevator and finds, to his amazement, that it sounds like it might be operational. He senses a presence behind him, but no one seems to be there.

The elevator arrives, and he steps inside. At the very last second, he sees that his watch has stopped, and senses that he's walked into a trap. He manages to stop the doors a second before they shut, and he screams for help.

The rest of the group hear him, and rush over to see what they can do. As they all work together to try and force the doors to slide apart, something appears to be lunging at Jon from underneath the elevator. Jon gets knocked off of his feet, then a pair of large claws tear through the elevator floor.

Rick grabs a fire extinguisher, intending to batter the doors until they open wider, but he manages to knock out Jon instead. Awesome. A demon clad in armor starts to climb up into the elevator, and Rick bashes it in the head until it lowers itself back into the shaft.

Tobias, who has remained back in the previous area with Emily and Sarah, somehow stole Rick's gun when he wasn't looking. He plans to kill himself with it, and Emily can't seem to talk him down. Suddenly Sarah speaks, promising Tobias that he will get to sleep when the ordeal ends, and he allows Emily to take the weapon from him. He rambles about how cold he's getting, and Emily just stands between the both of them,looking perplexed. Join the club, babe!

Rick and Ben pull Jon's slumped-over body out of the elevator, but then the scaly monster comes back. It clenches Jon's ankle in its enormous mouth, and the struggle to free him causes some of the elevator cables to snap. They pull Jon to safety as the creature plummets down the elevator shaft.

Emily bandages the wound when they all reunite, then Ben notices that Sarah's latest drawing looks like the monster they just encountered. He attempt to ask her about it, but she gets fixated on wanting the red crayon again.

Jon antagonizes Ben, and they nearly have a brawl right there. Noise from the intercom interrupts the altercation, and everybody gets excited. Help might be on the way! They go out to the corridor to hear it better, then Emily attempts to make contact with the intercom.

A woman replies, and they hear her say that she's on the third floor. Then the voice warns them that "it" is coming, and the transmission cuts off. They figure that they had better make their way down to that person's location.

They get to the next floor, but find a wall where the door should be. They bash the wall until a large hole is made, but it's been bricked over on the other side. Well, so much for the third floor rescue attempt!

They arrive at the third floor, where Emily finds the body of a doctor named Walter. He's clutching a tape recorder in one hand, and they play a message that advises them to surrender Sarah to the creatures. Ben refuses, so the journey continues.

They find a corridor filled with corpses, and the armored beast comes lunging at them through a doorway. They try to escape, but it chases them. Rick fires his gun at the monster, telling the others to escape. He runs out of bullets, and the others hear him getting killed. Then, everything goes eerily calm again.

Jon pisses off Ben when he asks him to sacrifice Sarah to save the rest of them, and another near-fight begins. Then they see the world outside of the closest window. everything appears to be frozen in time, as is evidenced by a flash of lightning that is just hanging out of the sky. Even the rain is stuck in mid-air. That seems...odd...

The intercom distracts them yet again, so Emily answers it. A voice asks her what floor she's on, and they all realize that it's the very same conversation they had earlier, only from the other end. Emily was answering herself, and never realized it.

As a group, they try to come up with a reasonable explanation for everything that has happened so far. The top ideas are either that timed has stopped, or they've somehow slipped into another dimension. Neither of those concepts explain anything, however. Good job!

Emily and Ben return to the brick wall with a sledgehammer, to see if they can make an exit. Oh, and they find a gun on a body covered in sand. They leave Sarah with Jon, and warn him not to harm Sarah. Yeah, he's really good at following orders. Anyone remember how well he did when he took orders in the movie Aliens? (I checked...he was in that one, and he was pretty inept.)

Ben gets to work on that wall, and Emily reveals that she's also a single parent. Then they have a trippy moment, when they nearly come face-to-face with themselves at the stairwell. It turns out that Ben was the one who shot at Jon earlier. Weird, man.

Jon breaks his promise, of course, and prepares to surrender the autistic girl to the demons. Then Ben breaks through that brick wall, and he and Emily explore the new corridor. A noise leads to the discovery of some more corpses.

Jon loudly announces that he's brought Sarah to be sacrificed, and tries to draw them out into the open. Someone plunges a knife through his back, and we see that it's Tobias, attempting to rescue Sarah. Ben and Emily hear some of it on their end of the transmission, then we see Jon giving Tobias the thrashing of his life.

Sarah draws another image, one that predicts Jon's death. The lights flicker, then Jon is bombarded by a hurricane-like wind, and a large mass of sand and dirt. When it stops, a mummy-like skeleton grabs Jon under his chin with one hand, using the other to rip out his still-beating heart.

Ben thrusts a stretcher at the monster, and it crashes into a wall. He checks to see that Sarah's okay, then he and Emily examine Tobias. Not only has he died, but he's well into a state of decay, appearing to have been dead for a few weeks. Not only that, but they find another mound of bodies on their way down to the second floor.

Ben asks Sarah to draw the exit for him, but she doesn't seem able to do that. As they stop to look for Sarah's medication, Emily remembers that there's a shortcut to the exit in the morgue. They celebrate, but then realize that Sarah is missing for the umpteenth time.

They split up to look for her, and Emily is forced to hide when one of the creatures arrives at her location. Unfortunately, Ben tries to make contact with Emily via the walkie, and the monster hears it. When the creature seems distracted by something else, Emily risks standing up, and attempts to escape.

No, wait a sec, she has another idea first...picking up a pair of defibrillator paddles, Emily sneaks up behind the monster. When it(he?) turns around, Emily places the paddles on each side of the creature's head, electrocuting it. Not wanting to stick around to see if she killed it, Emily runs out of the room.

Ben comes looking for her, and rushes through another pair of swinging doors. There's a flash of white light, and he discovers himself back in a very normal-looking area of the hospital again. It's filled with people and light, but no one seems to be able to see or hear him as he asks for help.

When he tries to tap a woman in a lab coat on the shoulder, his hand passes right through her. Is he a ghost, or is she? He leaves to look through a different corridor, and Emily contacts him. Neither none of them has found Sarah yet.

Ben stops outside of door 235, and Emily claims to be standing in front of the very same door. But where his location is brightly illuminated, hers is dark and abandoned. Emily references a poster of a teddy bear to clarify that it's the same door, and Ben sees it too...but it's very ragged and faded in her reality, while Ben sees it while it's clean and new.

Ben walks through another set of doors, and finds himself back in the decrepit hallway again. A fluorescent light flickers, and Ben sees his daughter at the opposite end of the hall. Then the very meager light goes completely out, and a tall demon shows up, something that resembles a typical zombie.

The monster growls like a tiger, and decides to beat the living crap out of Ben. While he's being tossed like a salad, Tobias suddenly pops up again. He sneaks up behind the zombie for a quick attack, but it anticipates his move, spinning around to gut him. As Ben turns to get his daughter, Tobias whispers that he's going the wrong way.

Sarah's trying to get away again, and she tells her father that she's trying to stop what's happening. Before he can clarify what she means, Emily returns. Oh, and the biggest demon so far also shows up, looming over all of them. Emily and Ben carefully back  Sarah's chair away from this new monster, and they enter the elevator. The demon strides toward them, soon breaking into a full run. Just as he reaches the elevator, the door slam shut.

They watch the various floors light up, and the light on "1" flickers as they reach the first floor. When the doors refuse to open, Ben tries to jam his finger several times on the button. The elevator starts to move yet again, stopping at a floor designated as "-1". It appears to be the hospital basement.

Sarah covers her ears again, and the ghostly woman pops up again. She screams at Emily, who now also has her ears covered. Then she and Sarah look at each other, and the ghost dissolves.

They proceed down the dark and shadowy hallway, and dead bodies chase them into another area, where the parking garage is located. As they look for a better escape route, Emily is cut off from Ben and Sarah by a door that slams shut between them. They try to get the door open, but then something on Emily's side grabs her.

Sarah warns her father that something is coming, so he gets her into an ambulance. They drive away, but there appears to be no exit. Ben crashes the ambulance into a row of cars, and has trouble getting it re-started. Then the largest demon shows up, complete with big, leathery wings and a bushy beard. They get away, but just barely in the nick of time.

Sarah starts to mutter "what happens will happen", while Ben drives around looking for any kind of exit. Ben decides to pull over, and he gently puts Sarah on the ground with a blanket. He promises that somebody will co,me along to rescue her, then he drives off to face the winged demon.

They see each other, and Ben slams his foot down on the gas pedal. Seconds before he strikes the demon, a white light flashes in front of him. He shields his eyes, then stops the ambulance.

It's Sarah. He walks over to her, and then realizes that he was being lured out of the safety of the vehicle. A black, writhing ooze crawls up his body, and he disintegrates. Then Sarah faces down the winged demon, and demands to go home. He snarls at her, and they seem to engage in a weird sort of debate. Sarah tells him that light can't live in darkness, then she closes her eyes.

We see the lobby of the hospital, as well as the elevator shaft, and several corridors. All are still empty. Then, after another flash of brilliant white light, Sarah finds herself back in the MRI machine. She screams and struggles, and Ben carries her out of the room.

Back in her chair, she lets her father hand her a blue crayon. Then they make their way to the lobby, where Sarah sees Tobias again. He leans over, smiles, then tells Sarah that he's not cold anymore. She drops the blue crayon, and it breaks, so Ben and Emily lean over to help her. THE END...?

Man, I  don't know WHAT I just watched. It ultimately wasn't a slasher, even though there were many, many dead bodies. But I'm still not even sure what happened. Were they all dead? Was the hospital even real? Who were the piles of corpses, and why did the demons get overpowered by Sarah? Weird. 3.5 out of 5, because it was pretty great as a visual experience, if nothing else.

And what did I learn after seeing Dark Floors?

-MRI machines are deadly.

-Ghosts are powerless against X-rays.

-Hospitals leaves their dead patients in piles, for anybody to just come across.

Next up: the less grim-sounding Pinata: Survival Island. Happy late Thanksgiving!

Doom Asylum

Hey gang! This week(ish), I've re-discovered a slasher flick I last watched in the late '80's. Even back then, this one was seemingly made to be mocked. Called Doom Asylum, I've spent years trying to recall the specific details of the plot, and even the correct title....I thought it was called Blood Asylum for many years, which made it even more difficult to track down. But I finally found it, so "yay, me" I guess. SPOILERS ahead!

Our cheese-tastic adventure begins with a terrible cover version of "House of The Rising Sun", and a convertible speeding down a deserted-looking road. The drunk couple in the car, Mitch and Judy, are celebrating because they just won some kind of huge settlement in court. Judy even goes so far as to pour wine or champagne all over the crotch of Mitch's pants, and make out with him while he's driving.

In a mind-boggling shocker, they have a collision with another vehicle. Mitch wakes up face down in the grass, and calls out to Judy.  He locates her several feet away and crawls to her position to hold her hand, only to discover that it's no longer attached to the rest of her. She tells Mitch that she loves him, then dies. No! Somebody lend her a hand!!

A couple of medical examiners begin an autopsy on Mitch when he's brought to the morgue, but one of them sees Mitch moving. He tells his boss, but the other doctor isn't convinced until Mitch sits up on the autopsy table, calling out to Judy. Mitch then stabs them both, and decides to go ahead and kill everyone in the hospital, and live there. Well, that all made sense!

After the opening credits are shown over about 17,000 shots of the exterior and interior of the asylum(an actual closed-down hospital, according to the IMDB....), we see the same road, and the same song is playing as a convertible races toward the camera. Wait, did I rewind this thing by accident? Nope, because a helpful subtitle tells us that it's 10 years later. I never realized how bland the future looked!

This car is filled with our first batch of victims: There's Darnell, the stereotypical jive-talking black guy; Jane(played by Kristin Davis, the only person I recognize in the movie), the nerdy psych major; Kiki, who just so happens to be Judy's now teenaged daughter(and played by the same actress); Mike, Kiki's indecisive boyfriend, who seems to be the only person so far enjoying his role by hamming it up with every line; and Dennis, who hasn't had any kind of dialogue or character moment up to this point, unlike the others.

Mike pulls the car over to the spot where the car accident took place, and he and Kiki find what looks like a mirror or a picture frame from the accident. The accident from a decade earlier. Yeah. Mike offers to nurture and support Kiki, and she asks him if she can call him "Mom". WTF? Okay, either this is supposed to be a comedy, or the movie is messing with me. Nothing is ever this strange by accident.

They get back into the car, and head to the abandoned hospital next. Wow, crash sites and empty psych wards...I'm not letting this group plan MY next vacation. They drive past a handful of signs that remind them not to trespass, so they take that as an invitation. Someone appears to be watching their approach from inside. I wonder who that might be? Oh, and apparently Mitch has murdered enough trespassers over the years to have his own urban legend. These kids know him as "The Coroner".

Then the movie introduces us to a few more potential victims, in the form of an all-female punk band. The group consists of Tina, the lead "singer"; Godiva, a woman with the worst fake French accent since Steve Martin ruined Inspector Clouseau forever; and Rapunzel, their group's representative African-American character.  Wow, so Darnell is officially not the "token" minority corpse in this one. For a slasher flick from 25 years ago, that counts as a bona fide plot twist!

The first group hears the obnoxious music from the asylum, and Darnell runs ahead to unplug the punk group's equipment, which causes a small fire. The 3 performers watch the others approach the building, and decide that a little taste of revenge is in order. Well, Tina and Godiva are up for revenge...Rapunzel is too busy drooling over Darnell(complete with a cut-away daydream of them running through a field toward each other in slo-mo), to be planning any vengeance. Then she talks about how hunky Darnell is, and her bandmates scorn her with sarcastic comments and eye-rolls. As she continues to fantasize and gush, Tina and Godiva create water condom bombs filled with hot water from a coffee maker.

Dennis finally gets some dialogue, but wastes it by gushing over his baseball card collection. After Jane tries to psychoanalyze his fixation over the cards, Kiki asks "Mom" for a kiss, and Mike obliges. Weird-ass movie! Just to contribute to the random wacky bits, The Coroner approaches the group, and compares a newspaper photo of Judy to Kiki.

Then the punk chicks lob their watery weapons at the group. Mitch manages to slip away unseen during the confusion, despite being out in the open during daylight hours. How could they not notice him??? Oh, and Dennis whines about some of his precious cards being damaged. And Tina throws back her head and laughs like Ming the Merciless.

The 2 groups yell back and forth at each other, then Tina cackles again and briefly flashes her breasticles(y'know, like guys have "testicles", so women have...no? Okay then, moving on...) at the group. That sets off Mike, but Darnell calms him down and offers to confront them himself, mostly to hook up with Rapunzel. Mike picks up one of the soggy condoms to try to entice Kiki into having sex(???with a ripped, used condom???), but she refuses, claiming that sex with "Mom" would be incest.

Darnell enters the building, and hears a metallic clanking sound down the hall. He calls out to Rapunzel, but gets only more clanging. Then he decides to serenade her with an impromptu rap, and Mitch kills him from behind with some steel tongs that pierce his temples. One down...

Tina and Rapunzel pass time on the roof by playing chess, while Godiva is spray painting a wall in the background. When Tina loses the game, she throws the pieces off the board and hisses at her friend. They notice that Darnell is no longer among the group in the grass, and Rapunzel hopes that he's coming to see her. That somehow leads into a scene in the lair that The Coroner has made his home, where he apparently watches clips from random black & white movies all day long.

Godiva leaves the rooftop to find a bathroom, and we see Mitch preparing a sink filled with acid. Godiva wanders to the mens' room, and her accent becomes Australian for a few seconds. Bizarre. Mitch is in the bathroom washing his hands, but he hides in one of the stalls when he hears her about to enter. I think Godiva's accent-mangling days are numbered!

Sure enough, Mitch leaps at her when she opens his stall door. There's a scuffle, and a strange bit involving The Coroner strangling Godiva via her shoulders, but we finally get to see him shove her head into the sink filled with acid. As he lifts her fleshless face back up, he rambles some nonsense about respecting her right to free speech. Then he giggles. Whatever.

The next scene returns us to Mike's group, just sitting around on the grass. Mitch should just get a rifle, and take them all out at once. They all wonder what happened to Darnell, then Dennis gets his panties in a bunch over his soggy baseball cards again. Mike offers to look for Darnell, and the others seem eager to send him on his journey.

The Coroner wanders the dark corridors of his lair with a lantern, and heads to his "bedroom" in the basement. There he has a flashback to the day of the accident, and he remembers his beloved Judy. Awwwww, see? Underneath that scabby shell, he's just a hopeless romantic. Or, he's at least hopeless!

Mike roams around the empty facility, but finds it empty. The Coroner just sits around watching more old movies. Even the camera crew gets bored, because they return to Kiki, Dennis and Jane once more. Dennis sees his Wade Boggs card fly away on the wind, and chases after it. Oh, and every time it blows further away, the wind makes this comical "whooshing" sound. Sheesh, this is dumb. Dennis fantasizes that Wade himself is rounding the bases, and follows the card.

There's a brief glimpse of Mike finding a skeleton, then more crap with Dennis, still immersed in his fantasy about baseball. Mitch discovers Dennis crawling around on the floor, and threatens him with a drill. He bores a hole through the nerd's forehead. Home run for The Coroner! Then Mike roams the halls some more, while Mitch lights candles. After his candles are lit, he picks up the rotten hand of his dead lover, and caresses his own face with it. I bet that must smell nice.

Mike gets to the roof, and demands to know what the punks did with Darnell. He and Tina have a fight, and it mirrors a fight scene in the movie that Mitch is watching. As the brawl is going on, Rapunzel just sits at the chess game, talking to herself about Darnell. Tina kicks the crap out of Mike, to the point that she has him dangling on the edge of the roof by his fingertips.

At that point, The Coroner has a breakdown over a sad scene on the television, and Rapunzel runs into the building to find Darnell. Oh, and Kiki and Jane see "Mom" hanging off of the side of the roof, but decide that he'll probably be fine. Then, more footage of The Coroner walking around in the dark.

Now that everyone is in the abandoned hospital, it's time for Mitch to pick up his pace. Or I hope he does...Rapunzel finds Godiva's melted skull and screams, which distracts Tina long enough for Mom to get back on the roof, and run past her into the facility. Then The Coroner sneaks up behind Rapunzel, and suffocates her with a leather strap around her throat.

More scenes follow, mostly of the characters walking up and down stairways, then Mom finds Kiki and Jane. Tina looks for her friends, and starts to realize that she's all by herself....then The Coroner opens a door directly in front of Mom and the girls, and none of them manage to see it. He swiftly closes it again, as they get closer.

Jane tells her friends to remain where they are, so that she can bring Tina's group to them, just to prove that they're all still alive and well. Mom reminds her that when characters in movies go off by themnselves, they usually die soon after that. And a wolf howls, for no apparent reason.

As Jane walks away from safety, she nearly collides with Tina. They accuse each other of being responsible for the disappearances, then Jane leaves Tina to wander off alone again. For an intellectual snob, Jane sure does seem pretty dumb.

As luck would have it, she has trapped herself with Mitch. Jane tries to assure herself that he's a delusion, and asks him to vanish. Then she backs into a chair, and more or less waits there to be killed. Using a small surgical saw, The Coroner slices through Jane's cheek and jaw, and removes half of her face in the process.

Tina steps into the room, and quickly realizes that she's in deep shit. The Coroner approaches her, but makes a getaway when Mom reaches the room as well. Mom sees Jane's body, and accuses Tina of murder, which she denies. She starts to tell him about her encounter with the killer, but then Kiki screams, and Mom runs off to rescue her.

This leads into my favorite scene so far, showing him running down the same corridor about a dozen times, shouting "I'm coming!" ever damn time, all while his girlfriend screams her head off. Funny as heck, and worth a point in my rating just for making me laugh. Mom finds his girlfriend staring at a corpse in a bathtub, and he informs her that they're being hunted by a psychopath. Kiki starts slamming him into a bathroom stall door as she cries and screams, then she finally calms down long enough to ask, "What's a psychopath???"

Mitch sits around on his mangled ass watching more movies, and Tina gets lost in the halls. Then the killer falls asleep, and has a nightmare about the car crash. Tina strays into a restroom, and comes face-to-face with her dead band-mates, causing her to vomit.

While Kiki and Mom pray to find their friends, The Coroner sneaks up to them. He hears them praying, and adds a sarcastic "Amen!" when Kiki promises God sex, money or a credit card in exchange for a miraculous rescue. Then he fills a large syringe with liquid from a large bottle he's carrying in his bag.

Tina rips a large metal bar off of a radiator as a makeshift weapon, and tries to be brave again. Then the movie shows her, Mom and Kiki looking for the killer, and jumping at every shadow and sound. The Coroner finds the couple first, and he injects Mom with whatever was in the syringe. Then he abducts Kiki, and straps her down to a stretcher in the autopsy room. Satisfied that she can't escape, he decides to watch more movies. Wait...what?

After the latest movie, The Coroner finds Mom, still alive, crawling along the corridor. He brings him back to the autopsy room, where he makes Kiki watch as he straps her boyfriend to another table. He removes the guy's shoes, and proceeds to cut off the toes on one foot. Meanwhile, Tina gets closer to his location.

Mom either dies or passes out from the agony of his injuries, and that's when Tina arrives. She swings her metal bar around like a bo stick, and Mitch picks up a fire axe. They duel around the room, and when The Coroner drops his weapon, Tina batters him to the floor. After that, she finally notices Kiki.

Tina unties her, and they apologize to each other for the way they acted earlier. Then Tina accidentally slips a conveyor belt on with her foot, and is killed by a machine that compresses and mangles her body down into a messy meat-cube. Freakin' hilarious, man.

Mitch then wakes up, and begins to pursue Kiki. She runs away, while he adjusts his tie and uses some breath spray. Kiki manages to get to a large kitchen, but somehow The Coroner has beaten her to the room first. She runs away again, and finds a way outside.

Mitch wanders through the grass after her, calling her "Judy" the whole time. When he corners Kiki and tries to kiss her, she knees him in the crotch. He limps after her again, then just stops to kneel down and cry. Kiki, being a dumbass, returns to talk to Mitch.

She sees him with the newspaper clipping, and realizes that he loved her mother. Then she remembers that he and her mother were going to put her in a boarding school, so she stabs him in the eye with the mirror she found earlier. Another old movie clip is shown, and Kiki strides away. THE END

Wow, this was one odd movie. I remembered very little of it from my previous viewing, which may have been a blessing. It did, however, manage to be both funny and gory, so I kind of enjoyed it. 3.5 killer trees out of 5.

And what did I learn from Doom Asylum?

-Severed hands are romantic.

-You can murder everyone in a hospital, and there will never be an investigation. Ever.

-Indecisive boyfriends are sexy to young women. Or maybe they aren't. On the other hand...

Next up is an odd-sounding slasher/musical, called Don't Go In The Woods. It's not the first musical slasher I've seen(that dubious honor goes to Slumber Party Massacre 2), but many say it's the worst. Hooray!

Body Parts

This week's movie was supposed to be last week's movie, but the DVD was cracked. Anyway, it's called Body Parts, and stars Jeff Fahey. I saw it when it first came out, but remember very little about the specifics, so we'll have to see if it's as good as I don't remember it.  SPOILER zone up ahead!

The movie begins by showing criminal psychiatrist Bill having a session with a violent inmate named Ray. It seems that Ray attacked another inmate that week, and is in prison for murdering his signifcant other. When Bill asks him why he attacked them, Ray bluntly admits that he simply likes killing people. Gosh, I hope he's the hero...

Bill goes home at the end of the day, to a young, hot Kim Delaney. Hubba. She plays his wife, Karen, and their first scene together involves them having a melodramatic chat about whether or not he's any good as a shrink. Yeesh.

The next morning, Bill is stuck in traffic, talking on a huge phone(Early 1990's gadgets, aren't they a hoot?) about all of the activities on his schedue. While distracted, he nearly gets wiped out by another vehicle, only to have a truck plow into his car, hurtling it around the road like a pinball. Imagine what would've happened if texting had been invented by then!

At the the hospital, Karen  anxiously wait to hear any news about his condition. She meets his surgeon, Dr. Webb, and learns that Bill's arm had to be amputated, all the way up to the shoulder. While Karen reels in shock, Webb also informs her that she can replace his arm with a donor arm, but that the surgery must be done immediately for the best chance of success. Karen hesitates, but eventually signs the conent forms.

Bill is brought into an operating room, and appears to be having the best trip-out since Woodstock. He sees the donor on an operating table across the room, surrounded by armed police officers wearing scrubs, gloves and surgical masks. Dr. Webb comes over to reassure Bill that beverything will work out, then she goes to the other stretcher to begin sawing off the donor's arm. As Bill is given anesthesia and begins to nod off, he sees that Dr. Webb didn't start by taking the arm, but that she decapitated the patient instead. If Bill wakes up with one arm and 2 heads, I'm giving this movie an automatic 10 out of 10 and turning it off right then and there!

Bill wakes up with just his one head, alas. His new arm is being elevated by some kind of sling and pulley. Both Karen and Webb are there when he wakes up, but he doesn't seem to really acknowledge either one of them. Besides, he has a breathing tube taped over his mouth, so he can't exactly respond to them even if he wanted to.

Later, looking more like himself again, Bill gets his first good look at the arm with all of the bandages off. it's pretty cringe-worthy. Then the surgeon asks him if he can move his new arm at all, and he manages to makes it twitch up and down for a few seconds. Webb seems impressed.

At physical therapy, Bill tries to lift a small weight. He manages to bend his arm up twice, then needs a rest. While he's just standing there, the arm suddenly shoots forward with the weight, then down again. The physical therapist looks impressed, but Bill just looks frightened. After that incident, his new arm seems to get much stronger, and soon, Bill is exercising on every machine like a powerhouse.

When the day comes for him to finally check out and go home, he thanks Webb for performing the miraculous surgery. As Bill and his family leave the hospital, a throng of reporters are waiting outside to ask him about the procedure. He humbly suggests that they should focus their microphones and cameras on Dr. Webb, since she was the surgeon who gave him the new arm.

When he gets home, Bill sits the kids down, and fills them in(sort of) on what happened. He then shows them his new arm, in all of its' Frankenstein-y glory. After that awkward moment passes, they all go outside to play in the front yard.

Later that night, Bill watches his hand as it caresses Karen, and they wind up having their Best Sex Ever. It must have been historic, because the next morning finds them making out as he heads out to his car. The kids just laugh like rabid chipmunks on an acid trip.

It's revealed that Bill now teaches instead of meeting dangerous lunatics in prison. Or maybe he does both these days. His class is packed, and the lecture is about what motivates a criminal to perform acts of violence. Twice during his lecture, Bill has brief visions of injuries and violence, and many students notice these lapses.

At home he cuts himself shaving, and swears up a storm in front of his wife and daughter. Then he has another session with Ray, the unapologetic killer. Ray mentions seeing the news about Bill on television, and observes that he looks disturbed and tired.

Bill tells Ray to trust him, and extends his new arm out to the convict. Ray sees a tattoo on the donor arm, freaks out, and tells the shrink that the specific tattoo he has is only worn by prisoners on death row. Then he just yells and screams for help until the guards come back to escort him to his cell.

Bill leaves the prison to pay a visit to the police department, where he heads to the Criminal Records division. He has a friend there run a fingerprint scan on his donor arm, only to discover that it once belonged to Charles Fletcher, a criminal who committed multiple murders, larceny, you name it. The day he was executed matches up with the day a "donor arm"became available.

Bill lies awake in bed that night, having more and more visions of violence. His wife finds him the next morning sitting up in bed, smoking and nervous. She tries to get him to talk about it, and they decide that he needs to see Dr. Webb again.

Dr. Webb tells Bill that it's silly to think that the arm is controlled by anyone else but him, and she suggests that he should talk to a fellow shrink. He discreetly tails her to the Physical Therapy area, and finds a file listing all of the patients who were given implants from the executed criminal.

He visits the apartment of Remo, an artist who was given the killer's other arm. Remo sees the visions too, and paints them on his canvases for a tidy profit. He tells Bill that the violent pictures have made his career flourish, and that his paintings are selling almost faster than he can paint them. When Bill insists that the killer's influence on his work is dangerous, Remo kicks him out.

Bill returns home, and starts writing down everything in his study. Karen walks in to remind him that they're going to a party for one of his colleagues, and scares the ever-lovin' crap out of her husband. As he yells at her, she retorts that he's benn Hell to live with lately, and she walks away.  They should've called this Body Parts: Waiting for Something to Happen.

Bill visits the cop who arrested Fletcher, and learns that Dr. Webb's transplants were very experimental and hush-hush. She even bribed people to get the prisoner into the OR faster than normal. Also, it turns out that the cop was one of the armed men Bill saw surrounding the other stretcher before his procedure.

A very weary and frightened Bill heads home, where his son surprises him by leaping on him from out of nowhere. They wrestle on the floor for awhile, until the son climbs onto the couch and body-slams his dad right in the new arm. Bill violently flings thge boy across the room, and Karen sees the whole thing. As Bill continues to writhe around on the floor, his wife tells him never to lay a hand on the children again.

Bill does more investigating in the morning, and finds another body part recipient, a young jock named Mark. Mark was given a new leg,and suddenly, his basketball skills are amazing.  maybe it's just me, but everyone else besides Bill seems to be enjoying success with the new transplants. Maybe his arm got all the crazy in it?

Bill follows Mark from his car, and sees the young man suddenly begin to drive in an erratic manner in a crowded intersection, So, it appears that the leg also has a will of its own. Nice of the movie to tell me that right after I speculated that the posession angle was a dud.

Anyway, Mark pulls his car over to calm himself down, and Bill approaches him. They discuss the transplants, and Mark admits that he doesn't always seem to be in contol of his new legs. Bill hands Mark his business card, then drives home for the night.

As they sleep in bed together, Bill's hand starts to touch Karen while Bill sleeps. When the fingers squeeze around her neck, Karen wakes up and screams. Bill is forced to move out, and he tells the kids that he'll return when he's no longer a danger to them. He checks himself into a seedy motel, and begins to hang out with the other transplant patients at a local bar.

As the 3 drunk men talk about whether or not the limbs could contain evil DNA, another patron tries to eavesdrop on them. He demands that Bill show him the hand, and a bar fight breaks out. It's pure chaos. And still, no body count.

After the fight ends, Mark Draper buys a bag of groceries and goes straight to his apartment. His new legs seem unusually week, and he barely makes it inside. He places a call to Bill, but is attacked early into the chat. Bill arrives too late to save the young athlete, and finds the body violently torn up, with the lower half torn off in pieces. Meaty, chunky pieces.

Bill calls the cops, and the lead detective is the same one who apprehended Fletcher. He finds it extremely odd that Bill would be at th scene of such a gory crime, and tells him that he'll need to come in for questioning. I imagine that Bill says yes, because the scene abruptly ends there.

We next see red smears flying onto a plastic sheet. Oh, it's just Remo, getting his Jackson Pollock vibe going on strong. As he admires his latest gory masterpiece, Remo senses that someone may be in the apartment with him. He does a search, but finds no one.

As Remo returns to painting, a figure leaps out at him, and pushes him out of the nearest window. Remo clings to the window, but the killer tears his new arm right out its' socket, sending Remo falling to the street below. In slo-mo, of course. Damn, I was hoping that Brad Dourif would have more to do.

A squad car pulls up to the building as Remo is plummeting to his death, and his body crashes through the windsahield. On the bright saide, that pretty much clears Bill of the murder, as he was with the cops at the other crime scene. That probably doesn't help Remo, though.

The detective tells Bill that he plans to be his personal bodyguard until the killer is caught. Bill doesn't seem to be very confident, but goes along with the idea anyway. Oh, and they're being tailed by Dr. Webb and one of her colleagues. I need a scorecard or some kind of chart just to untangle  this  mess of a plot...

Bill and his "bodyguard" pull up to a stoplight, and neither one sees a car approaching theirs. It pulls up next to them, and the driver is FLETCHER??? Well, I guess that somebody got a head transplant after all, as stupid as that sounds. Fletcher slap a handcuff onto Bill's wrist, and they're forced to speed along with the killer so that Bill's new arm isn't wrenched out of its' socket.

They drive like maniacs, struggling to avoid concrete barriers, orange construction barriers, other vehicles...Hell, at one point Bill even climbs through the car window to fight with the psychopath. In the end, Bill just grabs the detective's gun, and shoots the chain that links the handcuffs together.

They watch the killer speed off, and Bill decides to steal the police car and chase the killer down, leaving the detective looking befuddled by the side of the road. The killer pulls his car over when he hears the police siren in the distance, and begins gathering up the various limbs he's collected so far. At this point, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be scared or laughing, but I'm going with laughter. This movie's so ridiculous, I can't help myself.

As soon as the killer escapes with the limbs, the car he crashed explodes. Somehow Dr. Webb finds him, and she seems to want to reattach all of the limbs to one body again. I'm willing to bet that this movie is epic when you're high. I'm still laughing, though.

Bill takes a time-out to write a farewell letter to Karen. In it, he tries to apologize for his recent erratic behaviour, and lets her know that he still loves her and the kids. Then he mails it, and walks the rest of the way to the hospital.

In the operating room, Bill sees all of the various body parts in a tank, and some are moving and twitching. Dr. Webb arrives, and asks him to give the arm back. When Bill refuses, she makes a silly speech about how easy it is to do transplants now, even human heads. Bill still says no, so Fletcher sneaks up behind him, and knocks Bill out. Why the heck would Dr. Webb side with the killer?

When he wakes up, he's on the operating table, and Webb is just about ready to sever the arm again. Bill sits up and screams, right before delivering a knockout punch to the surgeon. Fletcher enters the room as Bill struggles with the anesthesiologist, and the killer accidentally fires his shotgun at the wrong person, blowing the medical professional's head off his shoulders.

Then Bill and Fletcher fight over the shotgun, and Bill nearly gets shot in the face during the struggle. He finally gets the, uh, upper hand, and manages to snap Fletcher's neck. The killer crumples to a heap on the floor, and Bill uses the hospital phone to call the police. He tells his detective friend that he killed Fletcher, only to have Fletcher raise the gun one last time, to shoot Dr. Webb. Bill kills him yet again.

Bill writes in his journal that, after Fletcher died, the arm never had any weird impulswes again, and the visions stopped. He and his wife sit under a tree in a park while the credits roll. THE END

What a mixed bag! Great gore, good actors...but the silliest plot and dialogue I've seen in a long time. Ande why so few victims? No wonder I couldn't remember the details from seeing it before--it was a goofball movie! Oh, and let me know if anyone ever watches it while high...I have a strong feeling that it gets much better if you do. Middle of the road this week: 3 killer trees out of 5.

And what did I learn after watching Body Parts?

-Transplants are a piece of cake! Even head transplants.

-When playing with your kids, throwing them into walls across the room is a no-no.

-The best way to tell if something is wrong with your new arm transplant? It makes love to your wife better than you do.

Later this week, I'll be torturing my eyeballs with I'll Always Know What You Did 
Last Summer. I hope the movie is shorter than the title! See ya then...

Visiting Hours

Y'know, before slasher films became self-aware parodies, they actually tried to frighten their audiences...I know, those of you who have only seen the Scream films and stuff like Saw probably think that slashers are supposed to be either ironic comedies or torture porn, but before the '90's, some slasher flicks were actually pretty scary. This week's film, Visiting Hours, is a pretty good example of this. As always, SPOILERS will apply, so read at your own risk!

The story opens up with Deborah, a reporter, interviewing a criminal defense lawyer. He's defending a serial rapist, and she gives him the 5th degree. As the interview gets more tense, her boss Gary, played by William Shatner has the station cut the segment short. Oh, and the suspected rapist, played by a rather creepy Michael Ironside, is sitting at home, getting angrier at the feminist reporter by the second.

On the way out, he tells her that her interview style is bound to piss off a number of viewers, and that he probably won't allow the segment to get on the air. Being William Shatner, he delivers every line with wild arm gestures and weird emphasis on random words. Anyway, Deborah wishes him a good night, then heads home. Angry, she decides to walk home.

Well, apparently "walking home" meant something else back in 1982, because we see her parking a car in front of her house in the very next scene. Inside, she finds wineglasses and empty bottles in several rooms. Her housekeeper, Francine, is nowhere in sight. The movie then treats us to a good ol' fashioned scary movie cliches montage: doors open loudly for no reason, lights flicker, there's even a pet parrot that leaps at Deb from out of nowhere.

Deb finally decides that it's okay to relax. She prepares to take a shower, and hears something in her bedroom. It's Colt, wearing jewelry, brandishing a knife and half-naked. He cuts Deb, and a chase around her home begins. Deb sees that the wound is gushing blood, so she locks herelf in the bedroom and tries to dial 911. As she realizes that the phone is dead, Colt removes some of the jewelry and starts to vandalize Deb's bedroom.

She opens a window, but no one outside can hear her screams for help. Deb decides to escape via a dumbwaiter, just seconds before Colt enters the bathroom. He finds her almost immediately, and they play tug-of-war with the pulley's ropes. Frustrated, the killer decides to cut the rope, and let her fall to her death. She crashes, but lives. As Deb tries to crawl to safety, she comes face-to-face with an older man, who calls 911.

At the hospital, the doctors determine that Deb has a fracture, but that the knife wound just missed being a fatal cut by a few inches. She's unconscious, but very much alive. Colt returns to his apartment, where he is accosted by a nosy neighbor who has the hots for him. Colt ignores her flirting and heads straight for his apartment.

His apartment is filled with framed letters and pictures of women he's attacked. I guess he doesn't get his decorating tips from Martha Stewart. Colt washes up and gets ready to go back out, and we see a menacing silhouette move toward Deb's hospital curtain. It's not Colt, though---it's some goofy-looking nurse who offers her a sip of juice. She tells Deb that the police need to ask her some questions, and that she's recovering from the attack rather well.

The investigators enter the room, and the nurse quietly leaves the room. At the nurses' station, we meet another potential victim, Connie, who has a VERY active social life. It's a good thing the killers in these movies don't kill oversexed young women, huh? She gets killed a few scenes later, in the room of an elderly female patient. Nurse Forehead finds the bodies, then chases Colt, who escapes via the elevator. After the police question her, our large-skulled nurse turns down a police escort and drives herself home.

Colt starts to follow her, clenching and unclenching a rubber ball. As the nurse gets home, she picks up some of her children's toys in the front yard, one of which sounds like a baby hyena having an orgasm. As she gets into the house, checks on her kids, and strips, a half-nude woman joins her. ROWR!

At a nearby coffee shop, Colt stares intently at a young blond. She ditches her friends and follows him home. Wow, that's smart! Colt's nosy neighbor tries to spy on them, but he slams her door before she can even voice a single syllable.

Inside his apartment, Colt spills a drink on the girl, themn tells her to strip. When she refuses, Colt aggressively attacks her and rapes the poor girl. He forces her onto his bed, then threatens her with a knife, but lets her live.

Deb decides to give a press conference during all of this, but finds the questions about her attack rather unnerving. Colt watches the press conference with his elderly father, and it brings back repressed memories of his father abusing him sexually.

Back in the hospital, Deb decides to visit the female patient in her old room, unaware that she was murdered. A patient named Vinnie tells her about the murder, and Deb demands to be released. Nurse Forehead tries to calm her down, which only makes her more upset. Somehow this leads to an abrupt scene where Deb is seen on a stretcher, surrounded by medical staff. Yup, it's always wise to confuse your audience.

In the next scene, we see Colt stealing a hospital uniform. An actual doctor walks in, sees that he doesn't belong, then demands that Colt leaves. The next time we see Colt, he enters the O.R. and injects something into Deb's IV. She starts freaking out, then falls asleep.

The scene abruptly changes again, and we see our favorite nurse trying to get her children off to school. One of the kids, Bridget, is sick and decides to stay home. Colt starts to photograph the mother, then returns home to make a collage. Oh, and he has more flashbacks.

Deb, awake after her surgery, tries to tell Gary that she saw her attacker in the operating room, but he refuses to take her claims seriously. Heck, he even starts eating her dessert in front of her. Then Nurse Forehead meets a patient in a clinic, the same blond who Colt beat up and raped a few scenes earlier.

Colt listens to a radio show, then sneaks back into the hospital through some tunnels underground. While Deb and the nurse bond, Colt meets a chatty patient who gives him WAY too much info about Deb and the staff. Colt nearly gets spotted, but ducks into the patient's room to hide out.

Shatner and Deb argue about her release, and she decides to try to formulate a way to capture the deranged attacker. That night, Colt enters her wing dressed as a doctor. After making sure that no one saw him, he kills the talkative male patient by stuffing the rubber ball into his mouth, then stabbing him to death. The security guard rushes in, and Colt attacks him, too.

As Colt escapes, Deb has a breakdown, and thev nurse soaks up her tears with thsat ginormous monstrosity of a forehead. Colt goes back to the underground tunnels to ditch his disguise, gets to his van, and drives away.

At his apartment, though, Colt gets a nasty surprise: someone broke in! They spraypainted the walls, they wrecked the furniture--and they found his picture room. He sees that two photos of Deb have been taken, and he rushes back out.

The hospital is in chaos, filled with cops and staff. Shatner promises to stay with Deb all night, and calms her down. Again. Nurse Forehead discovers that the girl that Colt raped earlier was the one who vandalized his home. When she swees the pictujres of Deb and herself, she tells the girl to take them to Deb's room.

A phone call from Colt makes the nurse freak out. She tries to get one of the many cops to follow her home, but they all refuse, so she races off by herself. Upstairs at the hospital, the rape victim waits to be escorted into Deb's room.

Back at the House That Forehead Built, Colt watches her drive up. She stops nat the kitchen first to grab a weapon to stab him with, then finds her kid's dolls beheaded in the living room and screams. She checks on both children next, and they seem safe. Back in the hallway, she thinks she sees movement from another room, and tries to sneak up on the intruder, but that room tourns out to be empty.

Nurse Forehead goes back downstairs to call the police, and Colt attacks her while she's on the phone, stabbing her in the stomach and taking her picture. While she cries out and writhes in pain, the kids all wake up, and call the police. As more cops arrive at the hospital, the rape victim, Deb and the Shat all stand around staring at the crowd and confusion.

Colt heads home, drinks some beer, and takes several pills from two botles. Then he smashes the beer bottle with his arm, and grinds the glass into his arm before calling 911. As both ambulances arrive at the hospital, we see the injured nurse with a breathing tube in her mouth. One of the kids glimpses Colt on a stretcher, and hides her face from him.

The SWAT team gets to his apartment, with Shatner tagging along. They find the photo collage, which shows that, without the pictures the young woman removed, it looks just lik,e a human skull. Creepy!

Colt waits for the nurse who brings him to get x-rays to leave, then sets his plan in motion. He sneaks into a handful of private hospital rooms, and fiddles around with their life-saving monitors. Then he attacks one of the security guards. Finally, he assaults Deb in her own bathroom.

She tries to grab a weapon, but he makes her drop it, so she throws a cup of clear liquid at Colt's face. It must have been acid, because he howls in pain and starts clawing at his eyes. As he starts to wash his eyes out with water, Deb runs. She makes it to an elevator, but not before he manages to get his arm in the door. She manages to hurt him with her shoes, and presses a number of random buttons.

Deb gets off after a few floors, and starts running again, and Colt starts chasing when his elevator door opens and he hears her. His kooky neighbor is in the hall outside his apartment, and she tells Shat about his trip to the hospital not long ago. As Deb lures Colt into a secluded, underground wing of the hospital, we see Nurse Forehead being treated, and a dog who barks at Deb from behind a large window. There's also a figure driving one of the staff's undrground go-karts, but it's not Colt.

Deb, thinking it IS him, hides. After the driver leaves, Colt leaps at her, and the chase resumes. Deb hides in an X-ray room, and sees Nurse Forehead on the examination table. A technician finds her and promises to get help. After a moment, Deb decides to see if the coast is clear, and finds Cole staring at her. The stupid inane chase begins yet again.

Colt chases her around a corner, and finds himself facing a series of curtainsd. Ripping down all 3 reveals nothing, sop he starts to wander a little bit. He finds another closed curtain and hesitates, just before a hands comes out, holding a scalpel. Deb stabs Colt several times, then uses the blade to push the killer to the floor. As he lays there dying, Deb sloooowly starts to leave, and Colt jumps at her one last time, grabbing her ankle with one bloody hand. Then he dies again.

As Nurse Sheila is wheeled away to b e operated on, Shatner and Deb find each other and head for the exit. The credits roolover Colt's grinning face. THE END

Well, despite being a day late and having NONE of the editing tools work,ing, I think I did pretty good this week. The movie? Eh, not so much. Thesetting was generic, and the heroine was downright pathetic. As far as hospital horror goes, I'd give this 2 out of 5 killer trees.

And what did I learn from Visiting Hours?

-Foreheads are deadly.
-Old women and drugged-out teens find killers to be sexy.
-Hospitals are death traps!!

No idea what my next slasher is, so it'll be a surprise for all of us! Hopefully, by then the editing tools will be working again!