• Directed by Brett Leonard
• Written by Gimel Everett and Brett Leonard
• Starring
  • Jeremy Slate
  • Cheryl Lawson
  • Stephen Gregory Foster
  • Danny Gochnauer
  • Geha Getz
• Produced by Gimel Everett

If you had seen this movie when it first got a video release, you’d remember. It had an embossed plastic cover, showing a zombie crawling out of a pit toward you in heavy relief. And the coolest part was that his eyes were two red LED lights. A spot on the box said, “press here,” and when you did — his eyes flashed! Cool!

Of course, that was over ten years ago, and there are very few of those embossed boxes intact, and even fewer with lights that still work (in fact, there may be none). And there are those who will tell you that, following the Inverse Box/Movie Law (i.e., that the coolness and gimmickry of the box is inversely proportionate to the quality of the movie contained therein), the movie ain’t worth the time of day.

Those people may bite me.

You can’t tell me that’s hospital standard issue.

I know it’s not a great movie. I know it’s got terrible flaws, and a whole collection of genre cliches. But I never fail to enjoy it, any time I watch it.

The titular pit is one filled with formaldehyde and the bodies of the failed experiments (or successful ones, considering) of Dr. Sam Ramzi (Danny Gochnauer), a brilliant psychiatrist/surgeon who’s been looking into the biological causes of insanity and kind of gets sidetracked into death for its own sake. Said pit, by the way, is located at the bottom of a spiral staircase in the basement of one of the buildings of the State Institute For the Mentally Ill, accessed by a secret passage through a broom closet. (Do contractors making mental hospitals routinely build in such features, just in case one of the doctors goes all whack-a-mole and needs a hidden lair?) Alas, such a Mad-Sci paradise cannot last, and Ramzi’s colleague Dr. Swan (Jeremy Slate) finally decides to stop covering for him and put an end to the madness. (The oft-quoted exchange between Swan and Ramzi: “You’re a doctor! You’re supposed to be saving lives!” “I’ve done life. Now I’m doing death.”) Despite Ramzi’s maniacal “You can’t kill me” stance, Swan refutes him with a bullet square in the center of the forehead (nice shootin’, Tex). He then seals up the closet entrance with drywall compound — though if it were me, I’d have turned off the eerie green light leaking through the cracks first; those things can run up a power bill when left on.

Fast-forward, then, twenty years. To that same institution is brought a pretty young amnesiac in her early twenties (Cheryl Lawson) — to be known as “Jane Doe,” naturally. She’s fairly stable, at least compared to the total wackjobs wandering the grounds; but despite having no memory, she has the fiercely-held conviction that she didn’t “lose” her memory, it was taken from her in a surgical operation. This does not endear her to designated head bitch Nurse Kygar (Joan Bechtel), who would certainly give her a tongue-lashing if not interrupted by an earthquake. Said earthquake, unbeknownst to all, pops open the sealed closet door; it also sends Jane into a full-blown episode, screaming that the people in the basement need help and want out.

Wow, that earthquake sure did a number on the foundation!

When she wakes from sedation, she’s given the “Welcome to the Wonderful World of Institutionalization” talk by the cute Nurse Robbins (Mara Everett), and has her first meeting with Dr. Swan, who’s still here but, you know, twenty years older (as evidenced by the fact that the brown dye in his hair in the prologue has been washed out). He starts a program of hypnosis to try to get to her memories, uncovering some kind of trauma from her early chldhood in which she was taken away from her father by her mother. Notably, Swan fails to install any sort of “release mechanism” in the hypnotic session, which means he has to shake her out of it when she gets agitated.

Later in the common room, she meets the roguish Chris Meyers (Stephen Gregory Foster), who apparently thinks he’s Sean Connery, right down to the accent. Why’s he here? Oh, just because he likes to blow things up — which still makes him one of the sanest in the joint. And there’s also a crazy nun. Don’t think she won’t come in handy, because she will.

Now that I’ve given you the setup, I can actually describe the entire center section of the movie in broad general terms, since what makes up the middle is the sort of broad general spookiness that you’re familiar with. Jane has plenty of nightmares, some about Nurse Kygar, some about a mysterious surgeon who she also sees in her waking moments, waving at her from the front of one of the other unused buildings in the hospital complex. Naturally, the nightmare episodes also give plenty of opportunity for the pleasantly zoftig (or “strapping”) Cheryl Lawson to wander the hallways clad only in a babydoll undershirt and some really narrow exercise briefs.

Night of the Backlit Dead.

There are also the usual creative killings — Nurse Robbins gets a lobotomy pick through her eyesocket, a twitchy inmate named Bud gets a dental drill through his eye, an orderly, a security guy, another orderly, etc. — all accomplished by the reanimated Dr. Ramzi, who has been released from his own pit by the earthquake. (Funny, I never attributed any specific mystical quality to drywall compound, but it apparently was an insurmountable necromantic barrier.) Under hypnosis, Jane suddenly starts speaking to Swan in Ramzi’s voice, promising to “save him for later.” This, needless to say, freaks Swan right out.

Desperate to get to the bottom of her nightmares and daytime visions — as well as the mysterious disappearances — Jane enlists Meyers to help her sneak out at night and get over to the other building. He does so, getting himself captured in the process, and Jane spends the next twenty minutes running around the empty building, chased by the Offscreen-Teleporting form of Dr. Ramzi, as well as the dead bodies of Nurse Robbins and Bud.

After playing with Jane for a while, Ramzi captures her and takes her to the dead pit (and for some reason, he changes her into a nurse’s dress — apparently he didn’t approve of her babydoll and sweatpants). And she gets to watch as, with a green light shining up, he reanimates his dead.

You think he’s mean now, you just watch what happens when you mention that zit…

And, I gotta say, they’re pretty cool dead, all slimy and bloodstreaked, many of them bald (brain surgery, remember?), in spotted and mildewed hospital gowns. They shuffle and stutter their way up the spiral staircase to wreak havoc.

Fortunately, Meyers then arrives to rescue her (the doctor’s apparently out on call at this point), and together they make it back to the main building to find out all about Dr. Ramzi and his nefarious past. Then, while Swan thinks he can go and plant another bullet in his nemesis and accomplish something, Meyers and Jane encounter the mad nun, who melts a zombie with a little paper cup of holy water. And then Meyers looks out the window at the big old water tower, looming over the empty building.

Let’s see. A nun who can make holy water, a water tower, a basement lair next to the water tower… and an explosives expert. I think you can see the finale coming, can’t you?

I’ll admit, there are flaws aplenty. Front and center is Cheryl Lawson as Jane — easy on the eyes, and far from being the worst actress here (that distinction would have to go to Nurse Robbins) — but she’s not exactly a take-charge heroine; while I don’t mind her de rigueur screaming (this is a horror flick, after all), the whiny sound she makes when when doubting her sanity or under duress isn’t all that endearing.

Doesn’t that hurt? Just a little?

Then there’s that whole cliche of the spook that only the main character can see (including the “look — look away — look back” vanishing act). Dr. Ramzi even gets to give a couple of the standard horror-guy one-liners — not a lot of them, but what they lack in number they make up for in groanability. (Ramzi appears outside Jane’s window at night, holding the head of an unlucky orderly. “I’m the head surgeon here!”)

In between the cliches, you’ve got the plot — which really makes no sense. By the time you get to the end, you’ve figured out the relationship between Jane and Ramzi long before they reveal it, but it still doesn’t explain the whole “surgical removal of memory” thing.

But, once you’ve reined in your expectations, there are some nice touches here. The presence of scads and oodles of certifiably insane people gives a great ambience. The zombies themselves, while only present for the last twenty minutes, are nicely disturbing, and not so slow that they don’t pose a credible threat. (I only wish that the gore effects weren’t so sloppily and obviously cut to get the R rating; Video Search of Miami apparently sells a rare intact director’s cut.) And the music, while much less than subtle, is fiercely unsettling (although it has been known to irritate some people, such as one of the roommates I showed this to back in my college days) — and it kind of has to be loud, to be heard over the continuous shrieking and gibbering.

Bottom line: While I’m sad that my ex-rental copy came in a plain black box instead of the cool 3-D zombie with flashing eyes, I still think I’ll keep it.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11 (plus a few others implied)
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 3 (plus 3 hypnotic sessions)
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0