Asylum: The Lost Tapes (2015)

Directed by Dan T. Hall

Viewed on Amazon Prime

 

Summary: A group of people are interviewed about something while we review footage of people wandering around an abandoned building. This movie is exciting as it is original. Also the answer to the upcoming question is no.

 

Welcome to the latest review in my series of “picking random things from Amazon video that had short run times”! I was thinking of looking at another movie from Manny Velazquez, director of Clown Footage, but I figured that maybe I should cast a wider net to see if I find anything interesting. I kind of did, but not really in the way I expected when I found Asylum: The Lost Tapes, a found footage horror movie in the genre of “people walking around an abandoned building with spookyness edited in” with a slight twist. Now I haven’t really talked about a lot of these haunted  abandoned building movies but I have seen quite a few of them, movies like Grave Encounters and Archivo 253 among many others that kind of make this style of movie all blend together. So the real question is, does Asylum do enough to make it stand out from this ocean of haunted mental hospital movies?

I’ve already pretty much explained the main plot of the film, which is that a bunch of young adults decide to do some ghost hunting in an abandoned asylum and then find themselves in way over their heads when actual malevolent spirits appear. I suppose I could break things down a little further by explaining who each character is and what their function in the group is but there is so little characterization that it seems almost pointless, save for one person who says she is mildly psychic. But again, that never really changes anything apart from her occasionally saying how she could feel a presence in a room or that she can feel some kind of energy, just super vague stuff that doesn’t really matter. That’s the main story, but there is a frame story that is somewhat more interesting and is really where the movie squanders all the potential that it actually had.

 

The frame story here is that there is a group of people who were previously or are currently involved in investigations concerning events that took place at the asylum when it was still a functioning asylum are all being interviewed. There is one current detective, one retired detective, an administrator from the asylum’s functioning days, one psychic and one paranormal investigator who are all being questioned, and this is the part of the movie that really made me hopeful because I could see how that premise, a group of people with different backgrounds and motivations all picking apart these bits of footage to debate about what actually happened, could make an interesting horror movie. Unfortunately that isn’t the movie that was actually made. What we have instead is a couple of people who speak in very vague terms about some tragedy that took place at the asylum that traumatized a former detective and is now part of a current investigation. It is less than riveting.

 

It is really a shame though because the acting of the people being interviewed isn’t bad and they could have made something more unique if they had a better script. I could see glimmers of something meaningful when the administrator was explaining things about the asylum, particularly when he would once or twice say something that seemed to contradict a previous statement, or hint at how things were bad and he knew about and is now part of some kind of cover up. If they went that direction and fully committed to the bulk of the film being each interviewee’s interpretation of what the footage meant and how that related to their story, either by supporting their own version or disproving someone else’s, that would have been much more involving. It would have just been a ripoff of Rashomon but Rashomon is a classic and it’s fine to rip things off now and then if it helps make a movie better.

 

Getting back to my issues with the script, the story is a bit muddled as to how we are seeing what we are seeing. The background is that during a construction project, when they were tearing down the asylum, I assume, they found video cards that contained the footage that we watch as the main story line, the police then connected the footage to a series of disappearances in the area, of the ghost hunters, and are trying to piece together what happened, I think. But this series of interviews is presented to the audience as if it were a TV show and not as official police interviews, which would have made more sense, so I’m not sure what the goal of the in universe TV show would be, because when we see the found footage aspect of it, the footage is clearly edited by the paranormal investigator to highlight every instance of paranormal activity that he believes he spotted.

 

Indisputable Facts.

Why let him mark the footage with such certainty if you don’t believe him? Why not just have him and the psychic explain everything if their opinions are just automatically correct? The detective says absolutely nothing of interest and the retired one only talks about how he encountered a grisly crime scene at the asylum in 1994, so neither of these things have any real bearing on what happens. I was waiting for all the commentary by the detectives and the administrator to take turns explaining what they thought happened or to have someone go into detail about what this horrific event was but the movie never gets there so all we are left with is just people walking around an abandoned building for forty minutes.

 

And that isn’t necessarily terrible, I’ve enjoyed movies that are just people walking around abandoned buildings, like Grave Encounters, but you need to do something cinematic with it and nothing really happens with these people until the very end. They bring up several times that there is one spirit who is particularly vengeful, called the Lady In White, who terrorizes the group but they never go into her background or what they could maybe do to stop her or how the psychic is affected by this and it’s just a mess. Everything about the story feels tacked on to justify why the movie isn’t over yet, and every aspect of the movie reflects that. All the footage of the people exploring is just so standard in design that I’m already forgetting it and I saw this movie yesterday!

 

At the end of the day though, I can’t be mad at a movie like this, I can only be disappointed. Disappointed that they didn’t realize where the real strengths of the movie were, disappointed that the writing is just so lazy, and disappointed that all the potential here was squandered. This all does leave me curious about the rest of the director’s filmography, especially since one of his previous movie seems like a companion piece for this film. I might have to check that out, but in the meantime, I’ll just say that while I can’t recommend this movie, if you do decide to watch it it is only 65 minutes so you won’t spend too much time with it.

 

 

 

 

I do not own any of the images used here. They belong to their respective owners and are used under Fair Use.