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STUDIO: Anchor Bay
MSRP: $19.98
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 94 min.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Featurette: Hospital From Hell
• Commentary with Writer/Director Mike Hurst and Writer/Producer Mark A. Altman
• Theatrical Trailer
• Screenplay (DVD-ROM)
The Pitch
“This story doesn’t make any sense. Put some sexy nurses in it.”
The Humans
Christine Taylor (The Wedding Singer), Shane Brolly (Underworld), Jerry O’Connell (Stand By Me), Chloe Moretz (Amityville Horror 2005)
"Must… eat… sandwich…"
The Nutshell
Shockingly thin schoolteacher Amy (Taylor) blows off her boyfriend’s marriage proposal shortly before they get in a car crash. A mysterious ambulance spirits him away to a hospital that doesn’t exist. Amy starts seeing demons everywhere, like in Jacob’s Ladder. Wait, no. It’s not like Jacob’s Ladder. At all. Forget I said that. Owl Creek who?
"What are you staring at? Is my tie crooked?"
The Lowdown
This is the second offering from CFQ Films, following All Souls’ Day (My review HERE). I threw writer/producer (and Cinefantastique honcho) Mark Altman the get-out-of-movie-jail card last time, thanks largely to his goofy, charming film Free Enterprise. But when he teams up with the director of… Mansquito? Dude. You’re in a unique position to make genre films with, and for, people who get it. Stop hashing together stuff from other movies already and support something original.
The little girl is good, in the generic spooky-psychic-moppet role. There are some effective chills involving ghouls in a corridor, though the concept is ripped off from The Frighteners. An early sequence features some of the most blatantly bad visual continuity I’ve ever seen. The nurses get naked.
"I also do Cheerleader and French Maid."
The Package
Dialogue (5.1 and 2.0) gets lost in the mix from time to time, but is passable. We get a decent 16:9 transfer. Say one thing for the CFQ guys, they know how to stock a DVD: Commentary, 40-minute making-of, theatrical trailer, plus the screenplay. In a perfect world, this would be the standard for supplements. If only the artists weren’t so uniformly self-congratulatory, and the movie so incoherent.