Asylum Blackout

An excellent throwback to the sort of horror movies they never should have stopped producing, Asylum Blackout is simple, tense, graphic and bloody. It's an endurance test punctuated by the genre highlights its audience expects. Everything you need to know is in the title: There's a blackout at an asylum and the natives become restless. An electrical storm allows the inmates to break out of their cells, but they're still trapped inside the stoic facility. Unfortunately, so are several guards and cooks, from whose perspective most of the unhinged violence is seen if not felt. While most films in this genre have become far too clever or too stupid for their own good, Asylum Blackout is exclusively a fastball pitcher. It never deviates from its objective and ratchets up the intensity quickly and effectively. This is a very solid low-budget claustrophobia terrorizer.