A good horror film doesn’t need jump scares or buckets of blood, I recognize that. More than anything else (trust me, I had to prioritize), what Inoperable needs is a sense of suspense and timing. It’s the horror film epitome of coming up with a really good comeback to an insult, and even though it’s way too late to say it, you say it anyway. And everybody cringes. 

Amy Barrett (Danielle Harris) is a young woman sitting impatiently in her car while stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a nice sunny day in Florida. Suddenly, she wakes up finding herself in a hospital bed with an IV stuck in her arm (don’t you hate it when that happens?), in a hospital that’s eerily deserted. A category 5 hurricane that was prepared to strike Florida with widespread death and destruction had apparently forced the hospital to evacuate, even though you couldn’t actually hear the hurricane at any point in the film.

Anyway, Amy abandons her hospital room in clean clothes and full makeup, begins walking around perfectly despite the accident, and low and behold, discovers other people in the building even though they were told to evacuate! She calls out to them, and of course nobody can hear her because we are now in ghost world, then suddenly we’re back with her in the car on a nice sunny day.

On Amy’s second trip through the time loop, the hospital ghosts finally notice Amy and continuously try to capture her. She teams up with a cop and some blond woman with big, um, assets, who lowkey informs her that she has to escape from the hospital, or else she’ll be killed and be doomed to its confines forever, eventually being trapped in an eternal state of torture by these mean hospital ghosts. This is eventually proven by seeing those poor souls return in future loops as weak, unstable mental patients who are subjected to weird military medical experiments. Why? Who cares.

Repeat this about 10 more times, throw in some gruesome operation torture scenes more akin to the liver sketch from Monty Python than a horror film, and you’ve got yourself a little film called Inoperable.

In a nutshell, it’s Groundhog Day with maniacal hospital ghosts! Thank God Bill Murray wasn’t recruited for this one. By our fifth time loop, we find out that it was that pesky hurricane mixing up Amy’s timeline all along! Remember that? The hurricane? That was supposed to destroy everything but was more silent than Paul Ryan? 

Harris couldn’t have acted truly frightened and frenetic even if she tried, but that is not her fault–there was nothing for her to go off of. It’s always a shame to see a seasoned scream queen with an impressive resume not being given the opportunity to exercise even her most basic talents, much less her lungs. The scariest thing about the whole film is that she lives in Florida. Sorry guys, you’re gonna need a lot more than flickering lights and ghosts that are literally just regular people to get the kind of reaction you were expecting. 

For some reason, by Inoperable‘s logic believes that a time warp = sudden use of antiquated technology, aka flip phones containing monotone voicemails from Amy’s mother following the accident, and 1997 Windows monitors in a hospital in goddamn 2017. Also antiquated for 2017: the idea that mental patients are horror movie material. Especially ones that walk around with their head down. Chilling!

I’m going to pause my criticisms for a moment, because I empathize with the difficulties of being a screenwriter. The premise of Inoperable is honestly not a bad one. Writer Jeff Miller and co-writer/director Christopher Lawrence Chapman were clearly pursuing a very ambitious idea worth recognition: a horror film about the psychological concept of inescapable loops of hospital torture that disrupt the space-time continuum. Jesus Christ! You have to give credit where it’s due. I know it’s a challenge. If anything, it might have worked effectively as a short film.

But please, do yourselves a favor and leave the pretentious mindfuck films to Christopher Nolan. At least he doesn’t improvise the plot and structure of the film.

Harris spends much of the film running, and running, and running. Which is exactly what you, the audience, should do, away from this film that should be found on a dusty shelf at a Blockbuster, especially judging by the era of technology it presented us with.