Haunted Hospital: Heilstätten Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Haunted Hospital: Heilstätten Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 14, 2019

In what may be the one unexpected thing about Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten, yes, people are still making “found footage” escapades. This is yet another “found footage” story set inside a dilapidated former “healing” institution, much like the relatively recently reviewed Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, to which this film bears more than a passing resemblance. The “found footage” genre, and perhaps even more saliently the subgenre featuring “haunted” locations that have troubled pasts, by now are idioms some viewers may feel have long ago worn out their already questionable welcome. The fact that there are still folks making these “first person” efforts, typically on smaller budgets and with what amounts to almost a template of extremely long set up with arguable dividends paid later in the film, may strike some as surprising, but at least this film is not the product of so-called “J horror” or “K horror” filmmakers, and in fact is German in genesis. It hardly matters, though, since just about everything in this film follows the pattern of many previous outings that plied the same physical and emotional territories as this one does.

Much as with Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten focuses on a bunch of teens with popular social media accounts who decide to do an “overnight” challenge at an abandoned sanitarium outside of Berlin that was once the location of “horrifying” human experiments during the Nazi era. It goes without saying there are tensions among the group which are exploited — recurrently — in the early part of the film, with things going bump in the night suggesting that the teens aren’t the only ones in the place. Suffice it to say mayhem — or at least implied mayhem — takes place, leading to a patently ridiculous “reveal” late in the film that may provide some unintended laughs despite its emphasis on trapped people being forced to undergo surgeries while more or less awake. It’s all silly beyond measure, though those who do experience goosebumps from this sort of thing may get a chill or two along the way, however derivative those scares may be.

Haunted Hospital: Heilstätten Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. This is a typical "found footage" offering with lots of "shaky cam", focus pulling "issues", and framing anomalies that all tend to affect detail levels pretty radically at times. The early establishing shots and outdoor material pops quite well, with a vivid palette and nice fine detail levels, but once the movie moves into the dark and dank hospital setting, there are recurrent deficits (some no doubt intentional) in shadow detail, to the point that it's actually hard to make out what's happening in some scenes. There are also a number of other intentional bells and whistles added to various moments, including what might be thought of as an analog to some of the POV shots in films like Predator 4K. There are some slight issues with banding, including in some of these POV shots, but on the whole this is problem free transfer even if detail levels aren't always optimal.

Haunted Hospital: Heilstätten Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten has very effective DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks in either the original German or an English dub. I'd recommend staying with the German due to the obvious mismatch between lip movements and sounds emanating from them, unless reading subtitles is an absolute non starter. As might be expected, the film's sound design is filled with sudden bursts of LFE meant to provoke startle responses, and while obviously a well used strategy, there are moments of aural shock due to sudden sound effects emanating from the subwoofer or even the side or rear channels. The claustrophobic confines of several rooms the hapless participants find themselves also are ably rendered with good attention paid to changing ambient environments. Dialogue comes through cleanly and clearly.

Haunted Hospital: Heilstätten Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:31)

Note: As with most Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the trailer has been authored to automatically move on to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those other trailers also play automatically at disc boot up.

Haunted Hospital: Heilstätten Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

One other surprise, albeit "extracurricular", may be waiting for some viewers courtesy of this film's 20th Century Fox imprimatur. It's kind of weird for such a major studio to be trafficking in such lame material (through what appears to be its German subsidiary), but it's even weirder to see a "Fox" film released on Blu-ray through the auspices of Well Go USA, a label which more regularly offers a lot of Asian cinema. This is a lame brained enterprise by any stretch of the imagination, though technical merits are strong, for those considering a purchase.