Crazy Eights (2006)★★★★☆

This one falls apart a bit if you start thinking about the plot too hard, but it’s pretty good. The setting is interesting (an abandoned old mansion/asylum), the antagonist is creepy (again, if you don’t try to think her character through too much), and the acting is slightly above average.

I was really impressed with how realistic the dialogue was at times. Maybe it’s just me, but if I were distressed and trying to find a way out of that creepy place, I would totally scream “every one of these windows has as a huge fucking steel thing on it!”

The music was interesting. At times there seemed to be sound effects within the background music on top of the sound effects from whatever was happening on screen. It wasn’t too distracting though, and I felt the music was really well done everywhere else.

This is also very clearly a low budget film. The opening credits were…I can’t think of a better word to describe them than “boring.” They were boring. It was white text on a black background in a font only slightly less boring than Times New Roman. I’d give them credit for being understated but they were too underwhelming for even that.

That said, I was really impressed with the depth of character development in such a short period of time. It feels like the writers had the characters before they really had the story, which explains some of the weird plot holes and inconsistencies. But because they developed the characters so well it didn’t matter how questionable their predicament was – I genuinely wanted to know how (and whether) they were going to get out of it.

The final scene, which I assume is meant to explain even more about the nature of the experiments performed at the asylum, really only illuminates some of the earlier plot holes. I didn’t feel unsatisfied with the ending, but it probably would have been just as effective without that last scene.

Overall, I was surprised at how interesting and entertaining I found this movie. It’s best if you don’t try to overthink things and just watch as the plot unfolds. The first half of the film can get a bit slow at times but it picks up after that and keeps up until the end. It’s worth a watch if you’ve got a soft spot for flawed characters and abandoned asylums.