If you saw the late 90s movie, House on Haunted Hill, this movie will seem oddly familiar. An asylum is run by a doctor/mad man who tortures his patients until they revolt and kill him. As is often the case, the asylum is later turned into a college dorm. However, one wing has yet to be converted and thankfully remains filled with scary asylum stuff and the murderous ghost of the doctor.

We then meet our characters, and it's like The Breakfast Club meets Nightmare on Elm Street. Every kids fits a cliché and has a back story that sets up how they will be killed. It will take you about five seconds to figure out who survives. As one would expect, the students are picked off one by one and we end up with our heroes v. the murderous ghost doctor. I won't spoil it for you as to what happens. Suffice it to say, it's completely expected.

Asylum isn't a good movie, and its made worse by the fact that it feels like everyone from the writers to the cast just gave up at some point. The horrors here are not original, the storyline feels like someone literally fed a bunch of different horror movies into a typewriter and even the people we are supposed to root for aren't all that interesting. In short, use this film as a way to make yourself appreciate better movies.

The teenager Madison McBride (Sarah Roemer) is traumatized by the loss of her deranged father when she was nine year–old and the suicide of her beloved brother Brandon one year ago. She decides to join the Richard Miller University, where Brandon committed suicide, to overcome her demons. While walking to her dorm, she meets the weird janitor Wilbur Mackey (Joe Inscoe) that tells her that the place is haunted. Madison befriends the recovering drug addicted Holt (Jake Muxworthy); the geek outcast String (Cody Kasch); the sexually abused Ivy (Ellen Hollman) and Maya (Carolina Garcia); and the joker athlete Tommy (Travis Van Winkle). All the schoolmates have traumas and the veteran Rez (Randall Sims) is responsible for them. String discovers in Internet that in 1935, their dorm together with an attached abandoned section was an asylum administrated by Dr. Magnus Burke (Mark Rolston) and considered a safe refugee for troubled teenagers with state-of-art treatment. However, in 1939, the interns uprose against the insane doctor, killing and disclosing the truth about his treatment. Sooner they find that their dorm is haunted by Dr. Burke that is seeking for tortured souls.

The lame "Asylum" is a forgettable collection of clichés that do not frighten or make laugh. The villain Dr. Burke slightly recalls Freddy Krueger with his sharp blades and bringing nightmarish memories to his victims. The characters are destroyed the same way they appear, without any development or care with the consequences. In accordance with the story, Mackey was eleven year-old in 1939. Therefore, in 2007, he would be seventy-nine year-old, still working and in an excellent shape. In the end, I would like to give my suffering for watching this terrible movie. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Asylum – Não Estamos Sozinhos" ("Asylum – We Are not Alone")

Only the most dedicated fans of asylum horror may want to bother with this one. It's not bad enough that it reeks of familiarity throughout, but the writing and direction are genuinely bad, the characters are far from being interesting or original, and director David R. Ellis ("Final Destination 2", "Snakes on a Plane") seems utterly incapable of coming up with some half decent atmosphere for this thing. It just falls flat, right from the start. The acting is uninspired right across the board, which is a shame, since there are two reliable veterans in the cast: Mark Rolston ("Aliens", "The Shawshank Redemption") and Lin Shaye ("There's Something About Mary", "Insidious"),both of whom are wasted, especially Shaye. The story deals with some typical college students assigned to a dorm that, wouldn't you know it, used to be an insane asylum decades previous. Not surprisingly, the doctor who was in charge (Rolston) was a barbarian who had disgusting ideas on how to "cure" troubled kids. So his restless spirit is delighted to be able to victimize these students, each of whom has psychological baggage. The good moments in this movie are few and far between; it does get somewhat more watchable as it goes along, but it never, ever generates any suspense or fright, even as our victims are confronted with images of their worst fears. The dialogue is ridiculous, as are some of the characters; Tommy (Travis Van Winkle, "Friday the 13th" '09) and Rez (Randall Sims) are the worst offenders. Sarah Roemer ("Disturbia") at least has some appeal as the female lead Madison, who witnessed a traumatic incident as a child, experienced another tragedy as a young adult, and who is afraid that she could have inherited the insanity of one of her parents. With not a single thing standing out in this unsatisfying mess, it's extremely forgettable, with a weak and groan-inducing ending to boot. This viewer can be pretty forgiving and not too hard to entertain, so the fact that he couldn't find anything to enjoy about this movie should warn you of just how bad it is. Three out of 10.