Hello Unkle Lancifer and Aunt John,
The movie I would like to find was one I watched on late night Cinemax or HBO sometime between '85 and '91. It was an "inmates take over the asylum" movie, but it was definitely not DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT. It looked to have been made in the '80s. I think the only sane person was a nurse, and she didn't find out until the very end that everyone else who "worked" there was insane. Pretty sure she ended up committed. I think it may have been British, but I'm not sure. It seems like the asylum was in a big Greek revival mansion.
Any help would be appreciated. The movie will probably turn out to be bad if I do find it, but I like bad movies.
Thanks,
— Wednesday's Child
Deep Red Rum (aka In It For The Kills: Horror Perspectives)
UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to kinderpal Amanda By Night for naming this one with COMMITTED (1991).
It's not from the 80s, nor is it British, but what about 1991's Committed with Robert Forster:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094900/
It's been years since I've seen it, but the description here struck a bell…
I love that one! It's got Horshack in it. I wish I could find a clip or trailer for it. I do know it's on Netflix Streaming. Hope that's it!
Wednesday's Child here. After watching a few minutes on Netflix, I think it was Committed. I remembered it being scary, but it's more campy than anything. That's why they call it a childhood trauma. At least I can enjoy campy.
Oh yes, and thanks Amanda for figuring that out!
You're welcome!
YAY! I solved a Name That Trauma!
I feel all big and stuff! 🙂
You know, I was thinking about this blog post as I walked my dog this morning and started thinking "There's a lot of movies about people being driven insane/wrongfully committed."
I even, vaguely, remembered two. One was set in what I think was the Victorian period. A woman keeps seeing this little girl that everyone else claims not to see, the girl gets badly injured and the woman at one point sees the girl crawling along the lawn as if her legs no longer worked. The woman also keeps going into this room where the wall paper keeps changing. At the end of the movie she's ripping the wallpaper off the wall finding the other pattern underneath and someone opens the door to the room to find her amongst all this shredded wallpaper laughing like a maniac and crawling around as if her legs no longer worked.
The other was about an actress who gets hired to play a crazy woman, only it's a plot because the actress happens to look like some rich woman. They commit her for real. All I really remember is this scene where her agent and her boyfriend both go to the people who hired her because she's missing, these people show them the video of her audition to show that she went insane was was committed. The agent acts like he accepts this and rushes them out. When the boyfriend gets mad at him the agent basically says that they're going to find her because any woman who can play crazy that good is star material.
Why do you suppose there's so many movies and books with the whole driving some sane person nuts plot?