The film opens with an 8 year old girl hearing shouting, walks out of her room to sit on the stairs where her 9 year old brother is already watching their parents having a screaming match. The Father ends up grabbing a gun & shooting himself whilst the Mother yells & begs for him to stop.Flash forward, the little girl is now all grown up & leaving the nest for college. Madison (Sarah Roemer) walks to her new dorm, the janitor warns her of this building which is disregarded by the security man.We soon learn from String (Cody Kasch) - a fun loving little geek - that the building was an Asylum back in the day where the Doctor performed experiments on teenagers with the belief he could cure mental illness brought on by childhood trauma.After that, one by one, each of the college kids are killed. Beginning with String - where he is choked by his own string... to Maya ( Carolina Garcia) where her abusive ex cuts her to death, & more, in what comes across as a hallucination to them.Meanwhile, Madison is dealing with the demons of her past, the suicide of her brother who attended the very same college - as well as trying to defeat the Doctor so the remaining students can live on.With odd & ominous rock music, sad background of each character & weird Doctor guy... This film was repetitive & sub par.The opening scene really drew me in & set the tone for the film, a dark & unsettling one. But it failed to impress me for a movie of this genre.The end was.. an end. It finished with Holt (Jake Muxworthy) & Madison escaping the dorm/asylum & running in the forest (cliché?) then Madison sacrificing herself for Holt only to release the spirits from the Doctor, thus ending his reign of terror & ultimately his existence. Then, after getting out of the forest, the two lovebirds casually hold hands & walk on the road like nothing life altering just happened to them...Overall, the development of the characters was lacking or rushed & the typical Frat guy Tommy (Travis Van Winkle) felt forced & the humour wasn't there despite them trying.Lacking character development - Forced cliché characters - Weird Doctor in bondage with bad make up & a big grudge on everyone just cause - Repetitive - Awful, awful musicEnd vote for this film is a 2Samm.Wise

I like horror movies, i enjoy it, but this... wow! it's too bad!honestly, i expect much more when I see the name, and the movie poster. I like the nice Sarah Roemer... so, i decided to watch itBut it so awful. The Script, the Acting... The Doctor is like a Joke, it don't scare anyone...I exoect a lot of horror. An asylum is too scary, i like it. It would be use to do a good movie, like Grave Encounters.All the story have a kind of nonsense...i don't know... it's bad..too bad.so, i think this an '80s movie in the XXI Century... AWFUL

This movie is so bad, where do I even begin?OK, so the beginning grabs the audience. Good lead in scene setting up the main character's tragic past. But it all goes downhill as soon as her father shoots himself and his body *flies forward.* That doesn't happen when someone shoots themselves. If they were reaching for realism, they missed it by miles.The movie fast forwards to the future where *coincidentally!* her brother shoots himself too. Wow! What are the odds that both her father and her brother commit suicide and were also crazy? Once again we have a plausibility fail. But it doesn't end there. Like other reviewers have noted; this movie is a lot like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Except, Nightmare on Elm Street was at least original for it's time. Now the formula is just sad. The mid-90s to early 2000s brought us the promise of evolved horror movies (Scream, Idle Hands, Final Destination, Blair Witch, etc), a chance for Americans to get away from the rinse-lather-repeat scripts of the eighties. So what happened here?It's almost cliché to call this movie cliché; but what else do we call it? It fits. I suppose "unoriginal" comes to mind, along with a handful of other unpleasant words but I'm trying to keep this review concise. This movie is what Lady Gaga is to Madonna; recycled ideas adding nothing new, and just more shock value in an attempt to amp up what amounts to a very poorly written and executed script. Yes, the lighting is OK. The set was fine. The special affects were bearable. But it doesn't matter, does it, when the entire thing is too painfully stupid to sit through.None of the characters were even remotely likable, despite the fact that the writers tried to make the audience feel empathy by giving each of them a sob story. Madison was sort of likable for a while, but even her whiny self-loathing martyrdom drained dry any chance the audience would give a crap that she wins in the end. Oh great, she lives. There could be a sequel where we can see her once again sulking around in self pity. Hooray? The guys all act like overbearing, unjustifiably aggressive dolts; and the only one interesting enough to watch was killed off early. I liked String. He was the only one who seemed to have a reason for being in the movie. Ironically he was the first one to go. The writer must be masochistic.The female characters were two dimensional stereotypes. We see Ivy, the blonde who for some reason must be promiscuous; ready to ride anything that acknowledges her existence. Then we have the saucy Latina who is standoffish and tough; I suppose the writers were paying tribute to Degrassi High - in a bad way. It doesn't help that the movie uses rape and sexual abuse as a cheap plot device to titillate the psychopaths in the audience. This is called sexism.I really wish writers would get a clue - intimidating and terrorizing half the audience with oppressive ideology does not a horror movie make. If you can't be original or imaginative, then don't even bother. There's a reason why movies like this get bad reviews, and it's not because people are "sheeple" either. It's because movies like this insult people with reasonable intelligence, a modicum of self-respect and basic human decency. Movie companies who produce crap like this for $$$ deserve every bad review they get.So, in closing, this movie is yet another addition to the mountainous pile of crap already out there. If you're looking for mind numbing, implausible, eighties rewind trash - by all means knock yourself out. Otherwise, best to give this a pass.

I found ASYLUM sitting on a shelf at the local DVD store, I didn't know a thing about this movie but that hasn't stopped me before, I rented it, took it home, popped it in the player and as the pre-credits rolled I noticed two familiar names, one was that of the producer Ashok Amritaj whose other credits in the horror genre includes a more popular film called TRICK'R'TREAT and the second was David R. Ellis whose credits include FINAL DESTINATION 2 and 4 and CELLULAR, so I reckoned this film should either be interesting or it should really suck since I never heard of it.The film turned out to be good after all, it wasn't something I would tell everyone about, it starts off as a ghost story setting up the mood developing the characters but later it turns more into a slasher and of course you get the usual set of clichés, but on the plus side the characters are of course your typical young teen slasher types but some of them are actually likable (halelluja a slasher with likable characters) it features pretty good cinematography that succeeds in creating atmosphere, it has a pretty cool villain that reminds me a bit of Freddy Kreuger and it doesn't resort to showcasing a bunch of tits and ass to make up for its poor script, although the script isn't that poor but its not that great either.In way after watching this film I also thought if people wanted to know how would A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET be if it was brought out today, I would say just watch this film and I'm mainly saying that because of the villain of the story who preys on his victims fears, Freddy also preys on his victims fears but he does it through their dreams, I might be wrong but that's what I think.