Writer: Kirsten McCallion
Director: Marcus Nispel
Exeter (aka The Asylum) is billed as “From the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday The 13th”. Don’t let that confuse you; Nispel directed the 21st century remakes of those films, not the original classics.
The film takes place in a building originally built in 1916 as the Exeter School For The Feeble-Minded The place had a reputation for mistreatment of its patients and was eventually closed down in the 1970s after a fire.
Today, Father Conway (Stephen Lang) is planning to reopen the building as a youth centre. One of those helping him is young Patrick (Kelly Blatz). Patrick is a well behaved lad… but his friends are less restrained. Hearing about the old building they decide to hold a wild drink and drug fuelled party one night.
Next morning, seven of them are still in the building nursing various levels of hangover. Whilst messing around one of them apparently becomes possessed and violent. The group are trapped in the old building and need to survive and escape.
Not exactly an original idea, but how’s it handled?
Badly.
The first fifteen minutes or so consist mainly of obnoxious teens getting drunk and talking about sex. There is actually some important story setup here, however it’s still dull and irritating.
Once the real story starts things have the potential to get interesting. Unfortunately Nispel’s directing style is totally devoid of any subtlety or restraint. He’s clearly happier with action than atmosphere. There are some shots that show he’s capable of spooky scenes, however just as the tension is building he feels the need to throw in a jump scare or someone running and screaming. Which might work if it was frightening, but it isn’t. There are a large number of attempted jump scares accompanied by crashing music. Which might work if the jumps were actually scary, but they’re not.
There are also some attempts at humour, though for the most part these miss the mark. It’s difficult to find a line funny when it’s delivered by a generic, unsympathetic character.
The result is all a bit of mess that throws in numerous tropes, cliches and styles without making anything of them.
To be fair there is a decent (albeit hard to swallow) twist at the end, which also explains some of the idiotic character behaviour earlier.
But by then I’d pretty much given up caring.