Eloise

It's nice as a Notre Dame fan to have a bye week after a win, especially after beating Southern Cal. That means I get to have a stress-free weekend, enjoying spending time with my family on a beautiful fall day. Speaking of the fall, the cold weather is here, and I feel like I'm finally acclimated to the weather up here again. I remember in Florida when 65 degrees was jacket weather. This morning it was in the 40s, and I had on pajama pants and a hoodie. Florida's great, but I really missed fall in the Midwest. Speaking of the Midwest, let's talk about...

Eloise (2016)

The movie opens with pictures and news reports of the fire that destroyed the Eloise Asylum back in 1982. As I was watching this, my first thought was, "Wow, this guy has a really good reporter's voice." Turns out, these were real pictures, videos and news reports from when the actual Eloise Asylum burnt to the ground. What's cool about this movie is that much of it was filmed inside the old asylum outside Detroit and I wonder if I still worked at WXYZ if I'd be able to find archive footage of the coverage. Terry, are you reading this??

After we get the news reports, we meet Jacob. He learns from a lawyer that his father has died and he's set to inherit 1.2 million money. There's one problem: he had an aunt who was a patient at Eloise, and he needs proof of her death to get the money. So the next day, he goes to the administrative building to get her records. The problem is, on the last page, the one he needs, it says the records were remanded to the annex. To get them, he'd need a court order, and that would take six to seven months. Jacob can't wait that long because his financial situation isn't great, so he decides to round up a team to help him break in and steal them.

In that group is his friend Dell, played by Brandon T. Jackson. He's a petty crook who is also in a rough financial situation. Next, we have Scott, a man with a borderline obsession about the facility, including the blueprint. Finally, we have Pia, Scott's sister and a girl who swatted away Jacob's early attempts to woo her. She has taken care of Scott for a lot of his life, and she's not ready to let him go into a dangerous situation without keeping an eye on him.

Once we get to the asylum, the movie is kinda meh. While watching most of it, I was getting huge House on Haunted Hill vibes, the remake one. The hospital was run by a sadistic doctor, played by Robert Patrick, who inhumanely experimented on people by exploiting their fears, kind of like Doctor Vannacutt, but not nearly as interesting. The movie also has several scenes where you can see the old staff and patients through cameras, like in HoHH, as our plucky band of heroes navigate the corridors. It goes a bit further with how it uses the ghosts, and it takes it a step further. At several points in the movie, the characters keep going back and forth between the past and present. I'll get into that in a moment.

I didn't care for it. It's kind of boring. I dozed off multiple times while watching it, and as I'm writing it, I feel like my eyelids are getting heavy. A lot of it is silly. For instance, Dell is absurd. He's a bit of a hustler, but Jackson doesn't have the charisma or charm to pull it off, and everything leading up to his death is stupid. Earlier in the movie, he stole Jacob's dad's pocketwatch and decided to bring it along with him to the burglary for some reason. At one point, he drops it, and it falls to a different floor. Jackson decides to break away from the group to get it. When he comes to a locked door, he breaks it open, cutting his hand in the process. While rummaging through a medicine supply room, he starts stealing whatever he can get his hands on until the pain in his hand gets too great. Dell grabs what he thinks is an antibiotic and pours it all over his bleeding hand. Much like in cartoons, the camera lingers on the bottle, and we find out he actually poured LSD all over an open wound.

Hijinx ensue where Dell starts hallucinating staff members getting aggressive with him. He responds by pulling out his gun and firing away before running off into the darkness. He eventually finds himself in a locked room and then accidentally breaks a water main. The room then fills with water, and a bunch of ghostly hands grab onto his leg to move his drowning up about a minute earlier than it would have happened normally.

A big problem this movie has is that the jumps from the past to the present weren't interesting. The way you can tell you're in the past is that the movie uses a sepia filter, but there's nothing fun or scary going on. You just see the head doctor being evil, and that's about it. He experiments on the patients and then our main characters until they escape, and I didn't feel anything for them outside of when one of them gets a rough lobotomy, but that was the visuals doing the heavy lifting. There's just not that much to talk about. House on Haunted Hill did just about everything this one did, but better and scarier. There wasn't anything spooky about this, and I didn't feel tension at any point. Things just kind of happen, and none of it lands. I struggled to care about the characters and what they were going through because they weren't interesting. If a movie struggles to get you to care about what's going on on screen, it has some major issues. I think the one thing I liked about it was that they filmed in the old asylum.

4 Dr. Chainsaws!