Bad, but fun: Sanitarium

Sanitarium (the movie, not the computer game)

Directors/writers: James Eaves and Johannes Roberts

Heh. I went into this with low expectations. And ended up rather liking it. I
found this at imdb.com when I was looking up "Sanitarium" (the computer game). I loved the game, so I decided to give this movie a shot.

Dr. Max Warick (now apparently a mental patient) is being questioned about his experiences some twenty years ago with an experimental drug. It seems to work perfectly, yet...yet...something is wrong, as Max slowly comes to realize. The patients NOT taking the drug are getting worse. And then there's the mysterious deaths among the hospital staff.

Obviously low budget. Reminded me of those Bill Baggs not-the-Doctor movies with Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Sylvester McCoy, and other Doctor Who actors that came out when Doctor Who was cancelled in the 1990s. Except a bit better.

Yes, as a fan of "old" Doctor Who, I obviously have a high tolerance for wooden
acting, over the top acting, non-acting, and cheap effects. Overlooking all that (and the bad audio), I totally enjoyed this movie. As much as, say, Revelation of the Daleks.

Uri Geller is in this. Uri Geller! Ha ha ha. Actually, he was ok as one of the detectives questioning Max. Maybe it's because I had no idea what he looked like, it didn't stick out in any way. I have no idea WHY Uri Geller, except, why not
Uri Geller? Eh? Even if he's not known for being an actor, neither are any of the other people in the movie, and at least he's known.

Young Max did look quite mad towards the end.

Wish they'd done better with the sound quality. And video quality. I had to turn the volume way up. Was it dubbed? Looked that way at times.

Music...well. They composed one spooky 'insane' sounding tune and played it
over and over, sometimes obtrusively.

Story hung together surprisingly well. At first I was like, this makes NO sense
scientifically (why would giving one set of patients a drug make another set sicker? And why wasn't it a double blind experiment anyway?). But that was explained later. And ok, it was still a horror movie explanation, but it made sense within the logic of the story itself.

Not the most original concept ever (Now, "Saw" was a clever concept...) but not
bad. Some freaky images, some real, some memories, some hallucinations. Just stop with the rotating camera bit. Please.

Oh, and I loved the "Ah, that's the air conditioning. Someone should fix it" moments at the beginning (when reality was obviously warping and so on.)

So, any relation to the game? According to Johannes Roberts, no, but it's an interesting coincidence. The title was originally "Diagnosis." The U.S. distributors changed it to "Sanitarium", maybe to make the connection.

The protagonist in both is a doctor named Max. Both went a bit insane.

Game: more of an inner journey. Max coming to terms with the death of his little sister when they were children. And they're Americans. This movie is British.

Movie: more of an external horror. There was something similar with the death of Max's mother. Ah, hell, I'm a sap...I found their stories moving. Maybe because they weren't such Actors, I could almost believe in them as actual people.

I preferred the game (a classic in the "point and click adventure" genre) but the movie's all right.

Can I recommend this movie to you? Only if you have a taste for "bad" low-budget SF/horror. If you do, sure.