Room 33 (2009)

What you're promised: a group of roller derby girls and a few guys crash at a abandoned, haunted insane asylum. Oooh, creepy.

What you get: many shots of girls wearing very little clothing, a killer ghost, and quite a few scenes of people walking down hallways in an abandoned building. Also, a bit of digging around in old filing cabinets, scanning documents that say "CLASSIFIED".

Does it live up to the promises? Sure. Some of the girls even put on Rollerblades. There's a bit of hurried exposition that explains the mystery of the haunted asylum, but I wasn't paying enough attention, so I never really learned what was going on. It doesn't bother me. I can live without knowing the secret of this nameless asylum.

This was a pretty generic movie. The acting was pretty decent, even good at times, but the writing and directing never impressed me. It's not like it was especially bad or anything, but they never went anywhere more creative or interesting than your average haunted house movie. Along with the lack of atmosphere or tension, that makes for a bit of a lame horror movie. While exploitative in nature, this movie is curiously inhibited, with no real gratuitous nudity or gore, though there's a voyeuristic strip scene and a few quick shots of mutilated corpses. So, in the end, I'm left wondering to whom this movie was intended. It's not gratuitous enough for exploitation fans, and it's too tame for horror fans. The leads are obviously too old (mid-to-late 20s) to appeal to teenagers, and it doesn't seem to work very well as a mystery, either. Does that mean it's a bad movie? No, certainly not. But that does keep it from being very memorable. It can't hurt to watch this movie, if you find it on a streaming service, like Netflix, but I wouldn't actually waste the time otherwise.