George Kilner (Guy Edmonds) is bipolar manic depressive, and schizophrenic. His mother (Penny Day) and her mother also suffered from mental illness. In addition, George struggles with being sexual abused as a child. He willingly signs away his rights to enter Bedlam, an experimental mental institute which includes punishment, torture, and sadistic guards. George questions his doctor's (Peter McAllum) techniques as no one ever leaves the institution. He befriends an actress Sofia (Cassandra Swaby) and "Cutter" (Gary Boulter) also inmates.

The film was the usual people experimented upon and tortured in the asylum. I kept waiting for the characters to break out of their mode, but I found that the film fell into a bit of a rut. Okay as a rental.

Guide: F-bomb, sex, FF nudity ( Cassandra Swaby, Guy Edmonds)

Calling this movie awful trash doesn't even do it justice in describing how bad it is. I have never heard of writer/director Chew Barker, it doesn't seem like a real name, but I would hope he's never allowed near a movie set again. The story of a man who has himself committed to an Asylum, this fiasco still doesn't seem to have a plot and the script must have taken him no more then a few minutes to write. Everything about it is amateur hour, with cheap looking sets, the suggestion of gore but obviously no budget for any effects, no sense of style and small doses of sleaziness. At times it seems he was going for taking this story seriously and then it would become something avant garde, or at least try to. The entire movie is a failure, it doesn't entertain, it actually had me nodding off. Worst of all is the acting, reading off of cue cards bad. Some characters or maybe just the actors themselves were so unbearably awful every second they were on screen was torture. One actor was completely unintelligible. The first few minutes of the movie had me thinking it might be Ok, but this stinker sinks so fast and just stays there. There is no reason to watch this, not so bad it is funny, not gory, not interesting, not well shot, and hauls out every lunatic asylum cliché. Chew has only 1 credit to his name and it is Bedlam. If you watch this you will pray to never see him make another film.

This Australian film wastes no time in showing us what it's trying to achieve . A man is being held down and unseen people are trying to pull his teeth out with pliers and the opening title hasn't even been shown yet ! If this shocks you then turn off because the fun and games haven't even started yet and one wonders if Chew Barker has had a competition with someone to see if you can make the most disturbing and depressing film in the history of cinema ? If so he's definitely in contention for the top prize

!!!!! SPOILERS !!!!!!

A young man called George suffering from schizophrenia is committed to a mental asylum and what happens is supposedly based on true events according to an opening capitation but I was having a problem believing just how true this might be along with Barker being on the side of the mentally ill . It must be an absolute living hell suffering from psychosis and Barker does use expressionistic and deeply disturbing imagery early in the film to show George's illness . However more often than not Barker paints mentally ill characters with broad strokes that play up to every single hysterical stereotype of "psychos" . That said the lunatics in the asylum are great company compared to the ones running it . The male nurses are sadistic brutes and wear a crypto-fascist type of uniform more fitting to neo-Nazi street fighters who when they're not physically abusing the male patients are raping the female ones and if this mental asylum resembles Auschwitz that's probably because the psychiatrist running the place is indeed a former Nazi death camp commander

It's at this point you feel something might be overstated if this is based upon true events . I remember seeing a documentary in the late 1970s about the British psychiatric at Rampton where the staff constantly over stepped the mark but nothing like what we get with BEDLAM . If Barker is trying to bring institutional abuse in Australian psychiatric hospitals he's gone the wrong way about it . As someone tells George " It's going to be a tough sell to find anyone to believe you" and never was a truer word spoken . BEDLAM has very little truth in how it's presented . It also contains spoof adverts for psychoactive drugs such as "Brotak" , "Moxiton" and "Thorameal" but I took the time to google these so called medications while watching the film and found that they didn't exist and the film ends on a very weak meta-fictional twist that " It's just a film darling" which you could probably see coming and renders BEDLAM as pointless exploitation