If
the Beatles had worked as cooks in a maximum security mental hospital, they
still would have been vastly more talented than George and his slacker bandmates. Yet, for a day job, the pay is pretty good
and supposedly they are completely out of harm’s way. Of course, when the power goes out, all bets
are off in Alexandre Courtès’ Asylum Blackout (trailer
here), which
opens a week of midnight screenings tonight at the IFC Center in New York and
is also now available on IFC Film’s VOD platforms.
It
is 1989, so nobody will spoil the fun by calling for help on their
cell-phones. We will be rooting for
George to live, because he is a nice enough guy to care how the patient-inmates’
food tastes. He also has a hot
girlfriend, so he has something to live for.
Regardless, it is going to be a long night when the blackout hits.
The
chief guard, J.B., sounds totally cool, but he is actually an abusive hardnose,
which makes the opportunity for some score-settling even more attractive. In something of a perfect storm for loony
bins, George suspects the scariest prisoner, Harry Green, has convinced the
rest of the inmates to stop taking their meds.
From there, things descend into bedlam, so to speak, with hints of
further eeriness lurking in the margins.
Just
to recap, the descriptively titled Asylum
Blackout (a.k.a. The Incident)
combines a fully stocked nuthouse with a power outage. As long as the execution is serviceable, this
is a bullet-proof concept. As it
happens, Courtès’ work easily surpasses competent, approaching the outright
stylish. The audience never gets any
backstory on the loonies, but many at least have weird distinguishing
tics. While Courtès eventually meets the
gore quota for midnight movies, he takes his time setting the scene and
building the tension—what might be considered horror movie foreplay.
