Surprisingly incoherent and boring

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is by far the worst movie of any genre I have seen in recent memory. Unfortunately the list of duds is quite a long one, so special honors go to this heap of trash. This movie is completely amateurish, from its flat, high-school-acting-class-at-best actors, to its weak, predictable script. Furthermore, this movie is NOT scary. A cast of characters, none of whom are likable, grab a video camera and seek out the supposed truth of what happened in a now closed psychiatric hospital. Enter the madman slasher who still roams the halls, butchering anyone he can get his hands on, leaving us to wonder if the new explorers to the hospital will escape intact. Except we don't care enough either way to find out. Add to that a useless loud music score and you have a complete waste of 86 minutes of your life.

A group of researchers go to investigate an abandoned detention center which use to house many famous killers. Experiments had been done on the inmates and one of the deadliest, Darrell Coombs (Kosmenko) is somehow still there. The idiots wander off and get captured and killed as Coombs dispatches them. Bordering between torture porn and a slasher film, this low grade junk wouldn't move the meter for either genre. The absurd script is only upstaged by the lousy production and uninspired acting and directing. There is a little gore but it is of the who cares? variety. This wouldn't, and couldn't scare a soul. Even the downbeat ending can't supply a chill. Avoid.

If 1988 Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee Lloyd Bentson were debating whether Jim Kosmenko as PSYCHO WARD's title character was destined to be the next Jason Voorhees (instead of whether Dan Quayle was cut out to be the next JFK), he would say "you know what, I MET Jason Voorhees; Jason Voorhees chased after me; Jason Voorhees almost shish-ka-bobbed my mid-section; and you, sir, are no Jason Voorhees." Or Michael Meyers, as far as that goes. In fact, in the realm of masked serial killers, Kosmenko's portrayal of Darrell Coombs must be the most boring such characterization ever committed to film. (When I was growing up, a whole passel of Coombs kids lived just down the hill from us, and the little fingers of every last one of them was scarier than ANYTHING foisted upon the screen in PSYCHO WARD.) Let's get down to brass tacks. It's as if the script for this travesty said "insert gory special effect here" every three pages--and that the durn film editor forgot ALL but one of these inserts! I've rated a lot of horror films 8, 9, or 10 though they had few if any gory effects. (In fact, I just gave a "10" to what I view as one of the scariest 100 movies ever--THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER--and the most frightening visual in the whole movie is the expression on the wooden horse's face (which never changes, seeing as how CGI was not around in 1949). But when all your ads for your flick promise a slasher offering, there durn well better be some slashing in it! Drilling a couple holes in a single forehead doesn't cut it!

Looking for answers about the "Pandora Project," a rumoured medical experiment that used prisoners and mental patients as test subjects, a crew of "urban explorers" head to Black Creek mental hospital. Once there, as expected, the members of the group begin to drop off, one by one, in gruesome fashion.Let's be honest. . . it doesn't take much to make a reasonable slasher flick. Reasonable writing, actors, and direction are not necessities when it comes to this subgenre. Some of the most entertaining slashers out there were fairly unimpressive in the technical aspects. However, when a film fails in these departments and manages to deliver nothing else to make up for it, there is nothing for the viewers to grasp on to and enjoy. This is what happened with 'Psycho Ward,' the straight-to-video release from Lions Gate.As far as positives go, there's not much to say. The location is pretty cool, but it's hard not to make an abandoned mental hospital look creepy & cool. Also, another visual bonus comes from the gore & makeup FX which were somewhat professional-looking, even if the subpar direction, cinematography, and editing ruined some of the quality of the effects. Sadly, that's about it for anything worthwhile in the film. It's not original. It's not well written. It's not well made. Most importantly, it's not very much fun, which is just about the worst thing that can happen to a slasher filck.Final Verdict: 2.5/10.-AP3-