HAUNTED HOSPITAL: HEILSTATTEN (2018 - German)

Studio:      Well Go USA
Director:    Michael David Pate
Writer:      Michael David Pate, Ecki Ziedrich
Producer:  Till Schmerbeck, Miguel Angelo Pate
Stars:     Sonja Gerhardt, Tim Oliver Schultz, Nilam Farooq, Lisa-Marie Koroll, Emilio Sakraya, Timmi Trinks, Farine Flebbe, Maxine Kazis, Davis Schulz

Review Score:

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Summary:

Viral video stars encounter paranormal activity while filming a fear challenge inside Berlin’s haunted Heilstatten hospital.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Popular YouTube pranksters Finn and Charly challenge their viral video rival Betty to spend 24 hours with them inside Berlin’s haunted Heilstatten sanatorium, where tuberculosis patients were reportedly murdered in brutal Nazi experiments. While watching the teaser video, wheelchair-bound Vanessa convinces her sister Marnie, who operates a less successful social media channel, that Marnie’s ex-boyfriend Theo von Lutzow is guiding the group through the hospital. Marnie wonders why Theo would take anyone to Heilstatten after the terrifying experience she had there the previous summer.

Theo, Finn, Charly, and Betty arrive at the location with Finn and Charly’s production assistant Emma and set up camera equipment. Marnie shows up unexpectedly to angrily confront Theo. Finn and Charly offer to boost Marnie’s exposure in exchange for her agreeing to act as their medium.

Finn’s friend Chris arrives unexpectedly to frighten Betty. Theo admonishes Finn for not taking Heilstatten seriously. Theo recounts how a serial killer known as ‘The Beast of Beelitz’ smacked a woman’s baby against a tree before strangling the mother and raping her dead body. The mother’s husband, a chief doctor at the hospital, hanged himself when he found out.

Chris gets lost when he tries to leave. An unseen entity attacks him.

Emma finds moths all over everyone’s food. Someone explains that moths have a symbolic connection to tuberculosis patients.

Betty goes missing, prompting everyone else to search for her. While alone, Betty encounters a bloody woman in a bathtub. Betty gathers the others to show them what she saw, but the group finds the tub empty when they return to the bathroom.

A black light reveals blood smeared all over the walls. A message written in blood warns of a curse connected to moths. Marnie mentions that a vengeful female ghost known as both ‘Patient 106’ and Irina supposedly haunts the hospital.

The generator power suddenly goes out. A film projector inexplicably begins playing archival footage featuring the hospital’s tortured patients, including Irina. Marnie forces Theo to tell everyone the truth about the curse.

Theo explains that Irina became pregnant following an affair with one of the doctors, but her medical condition worsened. Irina killed herself and cursed the surgery room. Everyone who subsequently committed suicide inside Heilstatten, including The Beast of Beelitz, did so inside the same room where Irina’s ghost reportedly drives people mad.

Finn and Betty go outside to discover that their cars won’t start and their cellphones are missing. Moths fly out of Finn’s glove box. Finn and Betty discover that the gate back to the main road is now padlocked. They then follow the sound of a ringtone to Chris’ mutilated body.

Finn and Betty return to tell Charly, Marnie, and Emma what they saw. Upon discovering that Theo went alone to fix the generator, Finn and Betty go looking for him.

Charly leaves Marnie and Emma to recover the phone from Chris’ body. When he gets there, an unseen presence attacks Charly.

Finn and Betty find Theo standing still in a hallway. Theo warns that Irina is behind him before he is suddenly pulled screaming into the darkness.

Marnie tells Emma that she believes Irina wants them to finish their film so that her story can be told. Marnie also reveals that when Theo took her and her sister to Heilstatten previously, Vanessa tried comforting Marnie when she suffered a panic attack. Vanessa ended up falling and becoming paralyzed. At the time, Theo promised he would never bring anyone back to tour the haunted hospital.

Betty falls through a hole in the floor and sprains her ankle. While Finn looks for something to pull her out with, an unseen presence attacks Betty.

Finn finds Theo’s bloody body hanging from a noose. A moth flies out of Theo’s mouth. An unseen presence attacks Finn.

Marnie gathers Emma to escape when she senses that Irina wants to hurt them. The two women discover they are locked inside the building. Blood suddenly sprays from the sprinkler system. In the ensuing commotion, Emma falls down an elevator shaft and eventually dies.

After recovering from her own fall, Marnie secretly spies Irina in an operating room where Finn, Charly, and Betty are strapped to tables. Irina removes her ghoul makeup to reveal a human underneath. Theo enters and removes his makeup, revealing that he and Irina staged the paranormal activity in order to kill the viral video celebrities over an online broadcast.

Theo explains to the camera how he and Irina pulled off the haunting. Theo then tortures and mutilates the three captives.

Theo chases after Marnie when Irina tells him she is missing. Marnie manages to flee outside and escape Heilstatten.

Theo and Irina continue editing their video. For the finale, Theo shoots himself in front of the camera. Irina continues reviewing the footage, but her eyes turn white and moths swarm, revealing she really was Patient 106’s ghost all along.

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Review:

20 years have passed since “The Blair Witch Project” (review here) birthed the “found footage” boom. It’s been 10 years since the gimmick’s popularity peaked with the first “Paranormal Activity” (review here). And yet somehow, filmmakers who really ought to know better by now are still plopping out redundant first-person flicks like cinema sadists taking their whips to Secretariat’s corpse.

20thCentury Fox, a big Hollywood studio in desperate need of someone with a better read on hot versus cold trends, presents “Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten,” a movie so generic that its subgenre is part of the title. It’d be like calling “Friday the 13th” “Teen Slasher: Crystal Lake.”

Written and directed by Michael David Pate, credits claim “Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten” is “based on an original screenplay by Ecki Ziedrich.” You could replace Ziedrich’s name with one of a thousand pulled out of a hat, given that “Heilstatten” mimics countless similar movies where hapless twentysomethings explore a cursed building with a camera.

“Heilstatten” has about as much originality as you’d expect for being the umpteen hundredth “found footage” film featuring an abandoned asylum. Roughly the only thing somewhat different about this setup is that instead of aspiring filmmakers or amateur ghost hunters, the protagonists are obnoxious YouTube celebrities like Logan Paul or whoever, so yay!

You know the drill. The titular location is an abandoned asylum where cruel Nazi scientists once experimented on helpless tuberculosis patients. Homeless people are also known to commit suicide there, which is a refreshing change of pace from the priest who usually hangs himself, thereby cursing the property.

Being set near Berlin, the movie mentions that Hitler even stayed there once while recovering from a grenade in WWI. As if that’s not already enough evil stirred into the soup, there’s also a vague connection to real-life serial killer ‘The Beast of Beelitz,’ who smacked a baby against a tree before strangling the mother and raping her dead body. Cheery stuff!

You know the next drill too. Are you ready to watch a lot of filler featuring the movie’s main sixsome setting up cameras, flinching at shadows, and endlessly bickering with one another? How about plenty of peeling paint, creepy dolls, overturned wheelchairs in cobwebbed corridors, and flashlights sweeping across drop cloths in green-tinted night vision?

Man oh man, what excitement! I bet you’re just licking your lips with anticipation over the prospect of seeing someone crying into the lens while recording a confessional video. Gee, where have I seen literally every scene in this movie before?

The closest “Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten” comes to some sort of poignant commentary concerning its social media star subjects is one man remarking, “because of you, and that stuff you do all day, our youth is going stupid.” He should direct that criticism at everyone still setting their “found footage” films inside ominous old buildings.

“Heilstatten” winds down with a twist, which has also been done before, that may please people for whom such surprises can redeem routine. For the rest of us struggling to stifle disinterested yawns, 90 minutes is way too long for something so rote. What meager incentives “Heilstatten” offers for staying awake until the end aren’t nearly enticing enough.

The Well Go USA home video release of the German-language film, whose cover hilariously highlights the obscene pull quote “a must-see for all horror fans,” contains both dubbed and subtitled versions of the movie. Definitely don’t watch the dubbed version. Not only are the voice actors awful, but the only way you’ll ever remember “Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten” among the glut of “found footage” asylum movies is by referring to it as, “that one that’s in German.” If you don’t have that, how can you ever distinguish it at all?

Review Score: 35

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