Gen (2006)
(In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) Look, if you’re going to set a horror movie in an insane asylum—there’s only a limited number of plots made to take advantage of such a setting, and it’s not a low-budget, low-imagination genre entry like Gen that’s going to get away from the clichés. This Turkish entry doesn’t waste time going to the expected places, as it focuses on a mountainous psychiatric hospital and then cuts it off from the world thanks to a snowstorm. Then the corpses start piling up as a killer gets busy, and more clichés accumulate on the ground. Director Togan Gökbakar’s work has odd flashes of style and some kind of narrative twist at the end—but it all feels dreary and unoriginal. There’s not much to say here because there’s not a whole lot there—Gen is about as bland as can be given its setting and genre.