Crew
Director/Screenplay – Jeff Bühler, Producers – Chris Bender, Andrew Golov, Larry Schapiro & J.C. Spink, Photography – Robn Hauer, Music – Paul D/Amour, Visual Effects Supervisor – Christopher Dawson, Special Effects Supervisor – Jonathan Kombrinck, Makeup Effects Design – W.M. Creations, Inc. (Supervisor – Matthew W. Mungle), Production Design – Talon McKenna. Production Company – Benderspink Productions/Larande Productions.
Cast
Jesse Metcalfe (Jack Romero), Peter Stormare (Dr. Paul Gianetti), Kiele Sanchez (Lily Romero), Kevin Sussman (Dave), Evan Parke (Charles), Olivia Munn (Nancy Chen), Carlo Gallo (Vera Downing), Molly Bryant (Nurse Henderson), Armin Shimerman (Mark Gibbons Hawthorne), Lisa Arturo (Heather), Kurt Caceres (Loomis)
Plot
Jack Romero’s sister Lily has been committed to the Middleton Psychiatric Institution following a suicide attempt. Jack is determined to rescue her. Leaving behind a note about what he is doing, he fakes disturbed behaviour to get himself committed. Placed inside Middleton, he sets out to find Lily and break her out of the facility. In doing so he discovers that the institution’s head Dr Paul Gianetti has been conducting illicit experiments on the patients while trying to develop the drug Orpheum. However, this has had the side effect of causing the patients to become psychotic zombies.
Insanitarium was the directorial debut of screenwriter Jeff Buhler. Since making the film, Buhler has a number of genre screenplays to his name with the likes of the Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train (2008), Jacob’s Ladder (2019), Pet Sematary (2019), The Prodigy (2019), The Grudge (2020), Studio 666 (2022) and Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023), as well as having created/produced the George R.R. Martin adapted tv series Nightflyers (2018). For some reason when it comes to Insanitarium, Buhler credits himself as Jeff Bühler, although has not used the u-umlaut on any of his other credits.
There is a long line of horror films set in and around asylums – I have an essay on the topic here at Asylums. The theme of the innocent, perfectly sane person committed to an asylum goes all the way back to at least the Val Lewton film Bedlam (1946), while the theme of the person committing themselves to investigate/go undercover in an asylum as used here goes back to the non-genre Shock Corridor (1963). The horror genre also has a lengthy tradition of depicting asylums as places where doctors are conducting illicit experiments on the inmates – the plot of the doctor creating zombies was previously conducted in The Dead Pit (1989).
Insanitarium stirs most of the cliches of this sort of film. One has the suspicion that Jeff Buhler (or Bühler) has never actually visited an asylum himself or done any research on the topic before making his film. It feels as though nothing about psychiatry has advanced beyond the depictions in Shock Corridor (or for that matter Bedlam). For one, someone who is brought in for what would be an assessment period (Jesse Metcalfe after he goes running around in the street without a shirt and cutting himself) is placed in the same inmate population as the criminally insane (Armin Shimerman’s multiple murderer). And then there is the design of the cells, which looks barely the size of small bathroom cubicles with white-on-white walls – hospitals and asylums are usually designed with pastel colours intended to have a soothing effect on patients’ states of mind, whereas such a blinding white design scheme would surely be one that would drive people even crazier than they already are.
There is nothing particularly standout about Insanitarium. It progresses in all the ways that you expect it to. There is Peter Stormare who plays to the gallery as the mad doctor of the show. Jeff Buhler does eventually serve up some horror effect – there is a very nasty scene mid film where the head is torn off a cat. The latter third of the film goes for broke with the patients turned to zombies on the attack and Jesse Metcalfe trying to lead several of them in an escape, which requires that they climb up a dumb waiter shaft at one point. These scenes get bloody and deranged with people torn apart, limbs severed and a particularly nasty scene where Peter Stormare performs a lobotomy by jabbing an icepick up through a patient’s eyeball.
Trailer here