The Sickhouse (2008)

Very best movie i ever watch

Boring

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Horror fans can be finicky; I know this, I am one of them. But The Sick House deserves a higher review, in my humble opinion. Yes, there are "similar" films in this genre of Horror (the abandoned building/hospital/asylum), yet I was pleasantly surprised and it is not exactly as it appears to be in the "spoilers" or description. Yes, it is low-budget but the plot was interesting and the acting was BY FAR better than some other low-budget films of this particular branch of Horror. It is not an overly complex plot so you can enjoy it without having to figure everything out or "where IS this film going?". Enjoyable, mindless so you can enjoy it without trying to figure it out and definitely creepy at times. And it's not too long so if you DON'T enjoy it, at least you haven't wasted 2-3 hours!All in all, an interesting film with good actors and a good ending!

Once you have reached the stage I have in watching films and believe me Im up their with some of the top critics, you begin to realize a pattern in movies that people rate well that are crap and movies that people rate bad that are different and just not mainstream enough. this movie deserves much more credit than it got. it deals with some pretty serious issues and has a twisted ending which makes it all the more better. but let me elaborate just a little bit this movie deals with the black plague and this was a truly scary time for England and the world for that matter. but the way it is carried and how it is developed makes it very interesting and extremely scary. watch it and imagine yourself in the situations of any of the characters and you too will see that this could happen to you or could it. thats what great about it, reality could be bent or can it. who knows that is up to you, the film watcher into what you choose to believe.

A few years ago I saw a movie called Madhouse that was pretty good. Not as good as another similar one called Session 9, but still a fairly entertaining horror thriller about a mental institution. I expected something of the same with The Sickhouse, but I suppose it is meant to describe an orphanage from the late 17th Century that had been infected with the Bubonic Plague. We get a brief history lesson at the beginning of the movie about how the Plague swept through London in 1665, killing 15% of the city's population in a single summer. An American archaeologist thinks she has uncovered an ancient black cult involving priests and the plague victims, but she is brushed off by a British colleague, who is indifferent to her interest despite frightening revelatory evidence that she has uncovered. Public health, she says, sometimes has to be put before archaeology.Enter a car full of British punks, screaming through the streets in a stolen car and filming themselves using a stolen video camera. Before long, midnight strikes, they run over someone or something in the street and come skidding to a stop, and we cut back to Anna, the American archaeologist, who has somehow stumbled upon a buried 17th Century street.This is where I got lost, and I stayed lost for pretty much the rest of the movie. We see clocks striking midnight a lot, so clearly something happens at midnight, but it's never really very clear what it is. And what is the deal with the buried street? I guess the Plague was so traumatic that that just paved over the old streets and built modern London on top of it? I have no idea. Anna is a huge problem in the movie. She claims to have this huge historical knowledge (and also does that intolerable thing late in the movie where everyone is fearful for their lives and she is frantically giving history lessons), but is astonishingly clueless about how to handle the Plague. At one point, one of the characters is supposedly infected with the plague, so they put him in a wire cage and then Anna suggests that they all go wash their hands.Wow, all those primitive Londoners had to do was wash their hands! Think of all the lives that could have been saved!The movie soon leaves any story behind and descends into a shabby special effects display that reminded me of old Nightmare on Elm Street movies. And if the special effects weren't bad enough, they also throw in the "I don't think any of this is real" thing, so none of it matters anyway. The story, rather than having much of anything to do with a mental institution OR the plague, is about an orphanage in which a series of terrible thing happened to five of the orphans. Surprise, there are five characters in the movie and, as Anna explains, history "seems to be repeating itself."No reason is given but none is needed. This is standard, 9th grade creative writing. Now we have the catalyst that introduces "death's design" which was kicked to death with three Final Destinations and provides a weak drive for the rest of the movie. There is a romantic moment at the very end of the film that is spectacularly out of place and dissolves immediately any character development that might have come before, and like much of the rest of the movie, it ends with a small child whispering some utter nonsense to us. We are told that the plague doctor will live on forever, "and you being a malignant host, an infant herald of doom."What?!?Well, let me give you a little chronology. The Sixth Sense - 9-year-old boy sees dead people. Ghost Town - annoyed British dentist sees dead people. The Sickhouse - American archaeologist sees dead British people. That would be really interesting if the movies were released in that order...

This movie reminded me a lot of Jacob's Ladder. It was a little slow at times. The acting was pretty decent. The special effects were good. There was a nice use of glitched effects. The costumes could have been better. I assume this was a low-budget movie. They did good with what they had to work with. The bathtub scene was probably my favorite. I would say this is worth watching. The movie was a nice surprise in that it was a lot better than I expected it to be from the previous ratings it had received on this site. I had not heard of the director prior to this movie. I think he did a good job. A lot of low budget horror films lack in good acting and special effects, but this guy really pulled it off in my opinion.