Fear Clinic

I wanted so much to like this but I just couldn't get into it. The actors were great, the effects were pretty cool and setting was right on. But the storyline was a bit weird and hard to follow in some areas.

It was alright. Not super exciting or scary though. Kinda a show to watch in the background while doing other things. Had potential, but didn't do much with it.

The acting is sub-par, and its really sad because it was a movie that could've been up there, but it's not even as good as "Truth or Dare" and even "Smile" was more interesting.

I guess if you have a phobia some scenes might be uncomfortable for you, but otherwise it's not scary in the slightest. There's some twists that you don't expect, but any effect they would've had was lost in translation/the lack of effective acting.

Waste of time to watch. Spend your time on something else.

Sometimes I should not read the reviews on here when there are only 5 reviews. I think it might have been people that worked on this movie and the reviews are rigged. I started watching it with an open mind, and seeing that it was not the usual horror story but something with a different concept I thought I was going to like it. But even if the theme was good the story was not well executed for me, it could have been much better. First of all it took much too long before it might get interesting and then finally when you could call this movie a horror story the special effects were pretty mediocre. I was glad the movie was over so I could watch something else and better to forget about this one.

Fear Clinic, loosely based on a series of shorts that appeared on the now defunct Fearnet, stars horror legend Robert Englund in his best role in years as a once celebrated doctor obsessed with curing humans of fear. But when an early, seemingly successful test group comprised of traumatized survivors of a mass shooting begins to not only regress but get worse, he begins to seriously doubt the validity and even safety of his methods.

However, this doesn't stop his test groups' faith in him. They all return to his clinic for further treatment, being locked up in a weird, sensory deprivation tank and forced to face their fears. But something evil, even supernatural, is lurking in the abyss he thrusts his patients into. It is fear itself, hence the title.

Feart Itself is fairly above average for low budget horror, but you really have to be patient with it. In fact, I have to say the filmmaker, the man behind the middling Laid to Rest movies, requests an unreasonable amount of patience from his viewers. It does not help that movie's production design is atrocious, all neon green lights and phony looking scientific equipment that reminds of the worst elements of 80's horror.

That's the bad part. The good part is that movie has a really good cast behind it. Robert Englund, in a role very different from his mad scientist portrayal in the original Fear Itself series, does a really good job as the benevolent but uncertain doctor. The female lead, Fiona Dourif (who was last seen costarring with her father Brad Dourif in Curse of Chucky) is an outstanding and unconventional horror heroine, more believably smart and capable than most of the female leads in these types of movies. Thomas Dekker also does a fantastic job portraying a troubled young man with a traumatic brain injury. Rounding out the cast are mostly adequate, if not entirely impressive, supporting players like Kevin Gage (Strangeland, Heat) as a crotchety maintenance man, Corey Taylor (that's right, the lead singer of Slipknot and Stone Sour in his first film, and he probably shouldn't quit his day job) as the hotheaded chief orderly, and several vaguely familiar actors as the other patients.

The cast, along with a really solid third act that includes a genuinely surprising twist and some cool creature FX from Robert Kurtzman, make this worth watching for horror fans, but just barely. The movie has major pacing problems, a weak first half, and can never overcome its low budget trappings but it shows glimmers of promise from almost everyone involved making this a more or less entertaining, watchable low budget horror movie.

As the title suggests the movie deals with people's fears, but sadly it's only a specific type of fear all the patients share because they have all experienced the same traumatic incident; i.e. we don't see a variety of phobias, which is a lost opportunity.

The cast and cinematography are fine and the movie looks like one with high production values, although certain scenes that depend heavily on special effects look really B-movie-sh; surprisingly, even the flickering of the lights looks B-movie-sh. The plot sounds really disjointed and confusing because of the way one scene leads to another; i.e. the editing is absolutely B-movie-sh. I could also tell the director had a thing for old men and used every opportunity to capture the reasonably handsome old doctor naked on camera, even though none of those scenes call for that.

I think despite the fact that the opening scenes are promising, this movie is going to let most people down and leave them with the feeling that they have just watched a B-movie that tried too hard not to look like one and its every attempt to scare the audience failed miserably. It kind of looks like an episode from Dr. Who.

I don't want to be too harsh, because I've seen worse, so I'm tossing in a 4.