When you consider that director David R. Ellis made the entertainingly dumb Snakes on a Plane and the sometimes fun Final Destination 2, it's surprising how lame and derivative Asylum turns out to be. Wanting desperately to crib ideas from the Nightmare on Elm Street school of horror there's little here that makes this worth watching and even though the effects guys sling a bit of blood around (including a pretty cool tongue cutting) it's all for naught since the final product is dull at best.

Madison (Sarah Roemer) is quite a messed-up young woman. Still haunted by the memory of seeing her father commit suicide when she was a little girl and dealing with her brother's suicide a year prior, Madison is about to start at Richard Miller University in hopes that thoughts of her past will be pushed aside with academic distraction. Which may prove to be difficult since she has visions of her brother shooting himself in the head and her necklace decides to come alive and choke her.

Of course, this might be because the co-ed dorm she's staying in was once an asylum filled with teenage patients run by the torturous Dr. Burke (Mark Rolston) who had a tendency to try and cure his subjects by ramming metal spikes into their eyes - a fact that the script by Ethan Lawrence enjoys dwelling on almost to the point of obsession. However, since this is from the supernatural slashers sub-genre, Madison and the typically clichéd batch of co-students around her decide to break into the mysteriously closed wing of the dorm, which only manages to unleash the evil spirit of our good doctor who, as we see in some flashbacks, got his just desserts when the asylum inmates escaped and took their revenge. From here, the good doctor becomes a tenth-rate Freddy Krueger villain knocking off the cast during weakly staged dream sequences while Madison uncovers the mystery of the asylum and tries to stop him.

Roemer, who previously appeared in The Grudge 2 and the surprisingly above average teen thriller Disturbia, doesn't make much of an impression but I'm not sure if that's just her or because all the characters are so bland. In fact, the only two cast members who somewhat rise above the material are Randall Sims as the prick-ish dorm overseer Rez and Carolina Garcia as wallflower Maya - though the scene involving both of the characters that skirts sexual assault is questionable.

Asylum has a few alright ideas going for it and is generally competently made, even though I found it had a tad too many dark shots for my liking, but finds itself constantly being derailed by tedium and having characters we just don't care about. Hell, even Roemer's heroine has the personality of a brick. But if I were to the point a finger at the most obvious problem here it would have to be the baddie. Horror flicks usually live or die based on the effectiveness of its killer and Dr. Burke just didn't do it for me. As an otherworldly murderer, Burke and his flabby forty-something frame is even outdone by Richard Lynch in 1988's mildly similar Bad Dreams.

This is just another mediocre effort that follows the by-the-book template of having our victims preyed upon using their hidden traumas and it treads a lot of the same ground as the previous year's DTV sequel Boogeyman 2 - a flick I enjoyed quite a bit more than this due to it having a lot more bloody nastiness on display and a pace that didn't make me drowsy. (Chris Hartley, 2/15/10)

Directed By: David R. Ellis.
Written By: Ethan Lawrence.

Starring: Sarah Roemer, Jake Muxworthy, Travis Van Winkle, Ellen Hollman.