Madhouse
(Lion's Gate Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(2005)
review by Don't Feed the Dead

Madhouse came recommended to me by Adam Green (writer/ director of Hatchet) with a great deal of praise for William Butler's macabre nut house flick. Gritty, nasty and an all out assault on the senses, Madhouse is a definite wake-up call to get the horror community running back to the 70's style of filmmaking. Of course, with every piece of attractive candy comes the consequence, and Madhouse was a schizophrenic mix of the good and bad.

Beginning his internship at Cunningham Mental Health Facility, Clark (Leonard) is introduced to an array of psychological mishaps - the treatment methods of the clinic, the innapproprate dosage and prescription of meds and yes, the occasional ghastly apparition wandering the halls. Led on a tour of the facilities by Sara (Ladd), Clark gets to see both the "normal" patients and the real psychotics that get locked up in the basement. After a fine "how do you do" with the clinic's shady administrator Dr. Franks (Henriksen), Clark is all set to start improving the conditions of Cunningham. Unfortunately,Clark picked a bad time to start his internship as someone or something has decided to go on a murderous rampage of the staff.

After the initial police investigation of the murder of head nurse Hendricks, Clark decides to do a bit of investigating on his own. While assigned to interrogate the prisoners locked in the basement, Clark stumbles upon a patient in a darkened cell who seems to know a lot about the facility's secrets. Half heartedly believing the words of the patient, Clark does some more digging within the characters of Dr. Franks and some of the patients who have been at Cunningham for a long time. Clark soon discovers that Dr. Franks is using placebos in place of "real" medication so that the patients never get better. Determined to expose Cunningham's dark secrets, Clark returns to seek the knowledge of the one patient that knows the history of the facility. However, this same patient reveals a greater evil to Clark regarding the murders, one that he must confront in order to solve th mysteries behind Cunningham.

Although there wasn't much new territory explored by Madhouse, the presentation of the film kept me very involved. Graphic murders and straight out disturbing imagery were welcome sights to a pair of eyes tired of "family friendly" horror titles. William Butler delivers a film that intends and succeeds in providing shock entertainment, complete with a storyline that prevents the film from coming undone. However, I did feel that Madhouse didn't quite live up to its potential as began to run out of gas towards the end of the film. Not enough was examined regarding Cunningham's past and I truly felt that there could have been more successful character exploitation (especially with Dr. Franks).

Known more for his acting in 90's horror films like Friday the 13th part 7, Leatherface and the Night of the Living Dead remake, Butler's first experiment at the helm of a horror is a success. Madhouse is a very stylish and visually explicit film that will definitely entertain fans of the genre, if not give them a grossout in the process. Available on DVD from Lion's Gate Films mid March, this is a title that I expect to get a lot of attention, especially since it's relatively unknown as of this writing.