Splattahouse 2: Insanitarium

TRAILER LINK HERE

While Brian Beck recovers from watching Embodiment Of Evil, here’s a corking little flick set in the kind of mental institution in which he almost certainly currently resides, drooling and repeating the phrase, “Coffin Joe he come to get I!” over and over again. Actually, the mental hospital in Insanitarium is actually quite different to regglier ones, but we’ll get to that.

Insanitarium, comfortingly, has genuine production values and actual Hollywood stars in it. There’s Jesse Metcalfe, who we ain’t even trying to feel after he hung out of the back of the hottest one in Girls Aloud, and there’s Peter Stormare, who we definitely are, on account of he was in Fargo and Jurassic Park 2. The former, who we openly invite to send to us any Polaroids he may have taken of Nadine’s mimsy, plays a young gentlemen whose sister is, unfortunately, one of the mentally unwell. When he goes to visit her at the booby farm where she is currently residing, in an attempt to bust her out, he slowly uncovers a dark secret: that the whole shebang is being run by a mad doctor (Stormare) who is experimenting on his inmates, and turning them into cannibalistic killers. For some reason. He’s a mad doctor, yo, he doesn’t have to explain himself to you.

So far, so good. But be warned: the frst 42 minutes or so of Insanitarium (which will, no doubt, be the title of top Luton horrorcore MC Coffin Joe’s second EP) are almost entirely claret-free. Depressingly so, in fact, But once the inmates start getting loose into the labyrinthine corridors of the hospital (why are horror film hospitals always labyrinthine? What happened to easy-access, easy-exit medical institutions with clearly signposted departments and helpful staff to direct you?) it kicks the fuck off better than when KRS One raped PDM Dawn. Or whatever he did. I can’t remember.

The closing 40 minutes of Insanitarium are like the first 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead, only with more zombies and more Sarah Polleys, some of whom are male and some of whom don’t survive. There’s a choice bit when one of the nutjobs snaps a nurse’s arm, then yanks it off completely and starts to eat it, while the game lass glowers at him and applies a tourniquet – you don’t get that on the NHS!!!!!!!!!!!!! Elsewhere, there’s judicious use of a meat cleaver to more than one face, and a particularly good deployment of that horror film staple, the knife-thrust-into-the-underside-of-the-chin-so-that-we-can-see-it-through-the-victim’s-open-mouth. But the best gore comes when we encounter a fully naked, decidedly hot cannibal crazy woman tucking into an unfortunate victim’s dangly man-part regions. Which means that, if nothing else, Splattahouse is currently batting two for two when it comes to films with cock-eating in them. Let’s see how long I can keep this up. As it were.

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