When his sister Lilly (Kiele Sanchez) is committed to a sanitarium that refuses to let him have any contact with her at all, Jack (Jesse Metcalfe) does the only thing he can think of. He has himself committed to be with her. He doesn't just go voluntarily commit himself though. He goes all out and does a really great job acting totally crazy. But then, as Dave (Kevin Sussman) tells him, "you committed yourself just so you can break yourself out again? ... right, so that means that you're not crazy, but you must be crazy to come up with that plan cause it's f'ing crazy," so he can't really be perfectly sane. Once inside Middleton Psychiatric Institute though, he finds a place much worse than he could ever have imagined.
The head doctor of the sanitarium, Dr. Gianetti (Peter Stormare), is on a crusade to cure crazy with a combination of electroshock therapy and a drug that he developed. Unfortunately, when there is a mutation in one of the patients, it starts spreading to everyone turning them all into bloodthirsty cannibals. There are a few scenes that reminded me a lot of 28 Days Later, except these people eat all parts of humans, infected or not. To make matters even worse, there is a maximum security wing of the hospital full of violent criminals, all of whom are now cannibals. One of them is Hawthorne (Armin Shimmerman). I only mention him because I love Armin Shimmerman. I think he's a wonderful actor in all the various roles he has played (Quark on Star Trek, Principal Snyder on Buffy, and many more). To survive this nightmare, Lilly, Jack, Dave, and the very few non-infected people inside must find a way out of the now-sealed hospital, without letting the inmates loose on the unsuspecting world outside.
There are also several bonus features on the DVD. The three deleted scenes make Jack seem much crazier. They deal with him remembering his crazy dead mother. I think they would have made my overall impression of Jack in the movie very different. The featurettes are interesting in that they give you a more in-depth look into the characters and the overall story of the movie. Like most discs now, Insanitarium is copy protected. But, Sony was nice enough to give you a digital copy on the disc that you can copy to your PC or PSP easily for your personal viewing there. When you put it in your computer to play, it'll automatically pop up the bonus digital copy interface. You can still play it without copying to your computer though.
As a horror movie, Insanitarium is good. If blood makes you queasy, you'll never make it through. However, if you can handle (or if you're like me and like) all the blood and gore, you'll enjoy it.
