It's been a long, long time since I've last written a review on IMDb, but after watching this "film" I simply felt compelled to. OK, so this is not your average crappy slasher where five or six people get lost in a forest (or a building or whatever) and swiftly get killed because they act like complete idiots. No, this has got to be absolutely THE WORST horror film of all time, and I'm not using this term lightly. I've seen films like Howling 7, Nostril Picker, Dr. Rage (aka Nightmare Hostel), to name a few, and all of them look like masterpieces when compared to Psycho Ward. To use an original but effective music parallel - compare Beethoven with Britney Spears and the gap between the two doesn't even come close to the difference between, say, Howling 7 and this one.
So, what is this about? You have a plot summary on the main page, so there's no need to repeat it. An abandoned prison, a bunch of idiots getting killed and (surprisingly) rather cool killer (really big guy with a mask and some tattoos), you've seen it all before. What stands out is that every aspect of the movie happens to be the worst ever.
First, the actors. Obviously, with the budget these guys had you surely can't hire Lance Henriksen or Michael Rooker, so I guess they had to settle for a couple of friends, who in turn obviously were highly unimpressed with the "screenplay", so at every moment everyone seems to be bored out of their minds. Even when they're about to get killed. The direction is also the worst, but at least you'll get a few laughs out of it. For example, there's a scene where this girl is running from the killer and she hides in a small room with some shelves. So the killer comes in, checks the shelves, sees that she's not there and leaves the room. Sure thing, the camera pans upwards and reveals the girl lying on the TOP shelf, right in front of the killer. Or, near the end of the movie, one of the guys is lying mortally wounded, his sister is trying to open the door and get the hell out, and killer is slowly approaching her from behind. The guy sees him while he's talking to his sister, but amazingly continues to talk about that other crap and doesn't bother to warn her. That was probably a revenge of some kind, because a minute earlier there was a hilarious scene where they tried to attack him, and by some miraculous coincidence actually managed to hurt him and instead of finishing him with a knife lying on the floor nearby, the girls runs straight for the door and leaves her mortally wounded brother to crawl for the knife at the speed of about one inch per minute. These are not the only examples, far from it.
Although the director is the worst, the "screenwriting" takes the cake here. You get all sorts of obvious clichés like cell phones not working and that "let's split up" thing, and this latter one is worth discussing alone. When there's four people left (there were six at the beginning), they absolutely positively without a shadow of a doubt decide that they are going to stick together and not split up under any circumstances. Of course, immediately some guy separates and gets killed. This girl, who they thought was working for the killer and tied her wrists, for unknown reasons runs away, hides, runs into the killer and gets killed. Three of them left, another girl separates and dies. So, it's only the main character and his sister left, but they decide that the aforementioned girl must be still alive after all, so instead of running the hell away, they go about "saving" her (you can guess how that ended). But it's at this moment that the lead character says the historic line "They died because they split away! We're not gonna repeat their mistake!" - the point being, of course, that five seconds later he says to her something like "Stay there while I check this dangerous-looking thing here!" I haven't even mentioned the ugly "photography" and the horrible, horrible editing (for example, we hear a scary sound and then someone startles... about ten seconds later). This and other reviews should be enough to convince you that this movie is indeed absolutely terrible, but to really appreciate the levels of stupidity it achieves, you'll have to see it for yourself. To help you on this journey, there are two girls who get topless (unfortunately, it's all near the beginning of the movie), and I had a really great help from the Croatian translator who inserted random swears in almost every line of dialog and was constantly mistaking the gender of characters (this could have been intentional, but I guess he didn't even see the movie and was using the English subtitles as a basis for the translation - for this I am grateful!).
