AllMovie

Dark Asylum is a good old-fashioned monster movie, nothing more and nothing less. And it's a fine effort, too, with excellent production values, a breathless pace, and a relentless, memorable, murderous beast that could pop up in a nightmare weeks later. Larry Drake -- bloated, baggy-eyed, and bald -- as "the Trasher" (because he stuffs his dead victims in dumpsters) looks like a depressed Uncle Fester in a straitjacket as he terrorizes lovely Maggie Belham (Paulina Porizkova), a psychiatrist who happens to be on call on the wrong night. It's a chase saga, a treacherous, nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse game through the empty corridors of an abandoned hospital; you don't want to be one of the cops or orderlies -- known in the B-movie business as "side meat" -- who takes the wrong turn down the wrong hallway. To his credit, director Gregory Gieras tries his dangedest to avoid cheap thrills to create chills (there are no sudden noises made by stray cats, for instance) and he manages to have the Trasher appear from unexpected places without defying logic -- too much. There are three places in the final reel that any other director would have found suitable for endings, but just when you think the Trasher has met his match, Gieras, who also wrote the script, keeps his hand on the throttle and bears down to a totally unexpected finale. Judd Nelson as a whacked-out janitor and Jurgen Prochnow as an alarmed doctor add legitimacy to the casting, although both are only briefly in the film. A sequel wouldn't be unwelcome, but they're not going to be in it.