Movie Review: Animus

Animus: (noun)
              1.) hostility or ill feeling
              2.) motivation to do something
              3.) [Psychology] Jung's term for the masculine part of a woman's personality

The first three minutes of Animus are better than the last six movies, and was already the most thought-out one of those six and scariest.

We see an older gentleman run into his office and lock the door. He's clearly freaked out by something. He breaks the picture of his wife and shoots himself just as his door opens.

There's a Journalism class being taught at a university. This leads one of the students, Maya, to look into Copper Queen Hospital. She starts having crazy dreams about being strapped to a gurney and getting electroshock therapy by horrifyingly disfigured creatures.

Maya and four of her fellow students head to Copper Queen to do their final project on it. They interview people along the way. At least when their sound wasn't the best, it was because they are college students using a camcorder and a cheap boom-stick.

They meet a woman who tells them about Isaac, a schizophrenic boy who was admitted into the hospital. She worked with him, read to him every day. He seemed to be making progress until the doctor took him "downstairs" for "therapy". He was locked away and after some investigating, the woman found out that Isaac was the doctor's illegitimate son. His wife tells him to get rid of him. We then learn what really happened in the opening scene. The boy, all grown up now, had killed everyone. He'd been living in the hospital that whole time and somehow escaped. When the authorities found him, he was dragging the body of a nurse. They shot him dead and buried him in a shallow grave.

The five students jump over a fence, get scolded by a man wearing green zebra pants (I'm sorry, sir, but that is not camo. It's zebra), and make their way into the creeptastical Copper Queen Hospital. A freaky recording of people screaming and a photo of phantom little Isaac and things start to get really weird.

Maya's abusive boyfriend shows up and fights erupt when he tries to drag Maya away. He pulls out a little knife, but stands by a body-shaped hole in the wall as the others surround him. A man - who is clearly not Isaac - grabs him and drags him away. The man is clearly not Isaac, because this man was a white ginger while Isaac is an adorable, little African American boy.

Daniel, who I just learned had a name, is killed and Maya's friend Angel falls into a pool of blood, bones, guts, and Daniel's severed head. After the grizzled white man with the bushy ginger beard, who is supposedly Isaac, kills everyone except for her, Maya runs and runs... into a mine shaft. She finds Angel, or Angel finds her. Anywho.

White Isaac finds them and starts choking Maya. Angel puts a pick ax into his head - a feat she couldn't actually do because he's about three feet taller than her. He somehow lives through that and kills Angel. Maya then smashes his head - AKA: a rubber mask - with a rock until his head - or the rubber mask - is completely flattened. She then inexplicably puts the pick ax through his face before casually strolling out of the mine. No, literally she might as well have crawled to the door she was going so slow.

This movie wasn't great, even with the gore. It met a few of the criteria checkpoints... except boobies. The gore was not really a selling point either as it was too quickly forgotten and moved on from. The rubber mask at the end was pretty funny though. Animus wasn't the best, but it certainly wasn't the worst.

Moral of this movie: Don't do your school work and never go to the hospital.