Writer: Aaron Drane
Director: Robert Hall
Fear Clinic – based on an episodic web series – could have made for a good, fun B movie. Or it could have been a fascinating meditation on the nature of fear. Unfortunately it’s neither.
The story revolves around Dr. Peter Andover (the great Robert Englund) who has invented a machine to cure phobias by tapping into the amygdala. His patients include the survivors of a masked shooter who attacked a diner. Andover has used his machine to cure their PTSD symptoms.
Or so it seems. But a year on, some of them are beginning to get flashbacks again – ‘fear aftershock’ as the film calls it – and return to Andover’s Fear Clinic. Here they find that Andover himself is a mess following an unfortunate incident where one of his patients died.
It sounds simple written like that. Unfortunately the storytelling is such a mess that it took me quite a while to work out what was going on; the who, when and why really didn’t gel. Eventually I put the fragments together, but just as I was getting the hang of the story it all changed.
Suddenly it became a monster movie. What the…?!? Don’t get me wrong, I like a good monster movie, but this one was farcical both in concept and in execution.
Still, a poor story can still be scary if well told. This wasn’t. There was plenty of dramatic music and camera angles combined with a lot of screaming by the characters, but nothing to scare the viewer. Zero atmosphere, zero psychological terror, zero quality monster.
Robert Englund is normally superb but even he can’t save this one and is totally wasted. He gets to show none of his usual spellbinding charisma, instead he’s mainly used as a walking infodump to explain the dodgy science and help the confused viewer follow the disjointed plot.
Perhaps Fear Clinic could have worked if it was made as a tongue in the cheek spoof, but it appears to take itself totally seriously. On that level it’s an almost unwatchable, incoherent disaster.