A young man (Andras Jones) awakens from a four-year coma only to be committed to a madhouse populated by wackos or psychopaths.

His new abode is strangely & inappropriately called The House of Love, & he has been categorized as criminally insane.

He is told he murdered his fiancee. But he doesn't quite believe he did, though he has nightmares & faded memories of an occult ritual gone horribly wrong.

The Attic Expeditions; aka, Horror in the Attic (2001) finds our maybe-crazy hero attempting to understand what has happened to him.

His efforts in his own behalf, & his doubts about his alleged crime, result in his cruel torture at the hands of Dr. Ek, played by the delicious Jeffrey Combs, who is for a new generation what Peter Lorre or Boris Karlof was for a previous generation. Ek may have a method of implanting memories of crimes in his patients.

Assisted by a fellow inmate (Seth Green), Trevor must resolve whether he is indeed an insane killer, or a mad scientist's lab rat trapped in an elaborately insane experimental hoax.

In the attic they investigate a strange box that opens into another dimension, or which is a doorway into the subconscious.

The structure of the film is deconstructive, novel, & imaginative, as well as a little disorienting. As much surrealism as horror, where inmate madness ends & Dr. Ek's begins becomes fuzzier & fuzzier, just as the margins separating the real from the unreal disappear.

Since low-budget horror films so rarely try for anything artistic or new, it'sAttick Expedisions is a film really worth taking seriously. It is not a tidy thriller, but an impressionistic journey, a much under-rated work that verges toward masterpiece.

As a surrealistic horror romp, it is full of originality & strangeness, but blessedly devoid of pomposity. It's an ideal film for the horror aficianodo who is not looking for the same old same old. It will almost require two viewings to figure out most of what is going on, & some of it may remain forever mysterious.

Continue to the next madhouse:
Hell Asylum (2002)

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl