Trevor Blackburn wakes up in a mental institution with no idea how he got there or even what year it is. Apparently, he has lost 4 years of his life in a coma and as he wakes up he finds out that he has been committed for a, and a brain surgery after his initial arrival has put him into the coma.

He finds out that he supposedly killed his fiancé in a ritual ceremony involving some “magical book”.

He’s being moved on to The House of Love, a halfway home promising uniquely personal treatment. There he meets Amy, who keeps drawing the same child-like picture over and over; Ronald, who keeps expressing himself with his Alligator hand puppet; Liz, a woman who believes the stories she writes keep the world in existence and Douglas, who seems almost normal except for his eccentricities.

Dr. Ek oversees Trevor’s life at the House of Love from behind the great curtain so to speak: an elaborate monitoring set-up allows Dr. Ek to watch and coordinate Trevor’s fate. With Dr. Ek is Doctor Coffee, who’s sole purpose seems to be to argue with Dr. Ek about his methods after initially watching the experiment with interest.

After a while, fellow inmates get murdered, and Trevor is the prime suspect. Real life, memories, bad dreams, all start to converge and Trevor begins to dream of a trunk in the attic which seems to hold the entrance to some magical room.

When Trevor’s girlfriend starts to reappear in his life and threatens to possess one of the other inmates and kill him, the situation becomes even more bizarre.

This film is the directorial debut by Jeremy Kasten who is only credited with editorial work or part of film crews until now. Considering this being a first-time effort, it’s a very good film and unless he gets stuck in this genre, there should be some decent films forthcoming by this director.

Unluckily, while well-acted and well-made, it really isn’t much more than the average “they’re messing with your mind” film with a touch of “things that the evil character would do to get his hands on the mythical black magic book”. Yeah, yeah, we’ve seen that before. And we all know that any dark magic stories must have some naked woman skipping around the ceremonial grounds naked and strangely detached people who seem very unexcited about the surprising death of their fiances.

Two storylines of the film were rather odd: First, we got Dr. Coffee who really doesn’t serve a lot of purpose outside griping about Dr. Ek’s experimentations on Travis’ mind. Considering he’s been invited to participate in the study, one would think that Ek has some sort of reason to bring this particular guy in and that said reason would be a certain expectation of like-mindedness. Alas, cheap puns about “that guy isn’t what he had in mind when he ordered coffee” offer themselves in abundance but we shall refrain.

Secondly, Faith, who seemingly attempted to kill Trevor in some ritual gone bad which ended up with her death instead, comes back from the dead to gripe at Trevor about him not keeping his promise of “staying together forever”.

Considering she tried to kill him in some ritual over a book, I’d say the relationship wasn’t going anywhere from the getgo, and just because she fouled up and died herself instead, is no reason to come back and haunt the guy and demand he finally get his butt in gear and die, too, since he said he’d stay with her forever.

Yes, he might have said that, but by golly, girl … there are times when you just can’t take that so literally.

The most likely audience for this film, I would assume, will be people who liked films like Final Stab, Brotherhood or The Skulls.

Trevor Blackburn is played by Andras Jones, who has a few movies under his belt but with titles like Averills Ankommen or Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama I think this has got to be his best role yet.

There’s a brief appearance of oldtimer rocker Alice Cooper as one of the patients of the first clinic Trevor wakes up in, brought back from an escape attempt by the arriving Dr. Coffee. Coffee is played by Ted Raimi who played Joxer in Xena, Warrior Princess and Ltd. O’Neill in Sea Quest, but also was in a number of well-known movies.

Most noteworthy in performance would be Seth Green, Dr. Evil’s son in Austin Powers and recently starring in Rat Race and Rock Star. Jeffrey Combs (TV: Enterprise) seems to have a thing for parts in good-enough horror films, seeing as he played in Faust, Love of the Damned, I still Know What You Did Last Summer and House on Haunted Hill.

Beth Bates (playing Faith) is noteworthy for really nothing except her very round butt which you get to observe naked a few times and can not help but wonder how on earth it got so round.

After watching something like Parental Guidance which is okay in its plot but looks like it was shot with a home video camera and an old tape recorder, one can appreciate a film even marginally decent, so this one undoubtedly gets a few points for being well-done in quality and mostly good in plot and story development.

But seeing as we already have more than enough of these types of film, I just can’t see it being more than average in rating.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS