Trapped in an abandoned insane asylum, five college students and the rogue scientists who abducted them must band together when a supernatural threat appears.

You’re probably thinking of many different ways this movie could all play out during the next 90 minutes based on that summary, and if you took all the most boring and clichéd parts of them and mashed them all together, you’d have The Control Group.

Ross Destiche stars as Jack, one of the titular quintet, who spends much of the film telling the others how much he doesn’t trust them because they just met hours ago. Corey (Shane Philip) is Jack’s new roommate, Grant (Justen Jones) is the douche-y boyfriend of annoying tough girl Vanessa (Jenna Enemy), and Kodi Saint Angelo rounds out the group as Jaime, the spacey, in-touch-with-the-spirits young lady who sounds as if she just got back from the Ancient Ways Festival after a shroom binge.

They start wandering around the building, which includes a…gymnasium? Basketball court? It’s got bleacher seats, at any rate. They take turns splitting up so one of them can get killed, then coming back together to annoy each other before they agree to try again to get out of this building. Along the way Jack meets Anne (Emily Soto), a helpful spirit who speaks in a Betty-Boop-on-helium voice (ugh) and tries to give him advice. The group also comes across what they call “crow-things,” which are basically hired extras dressed in black robes with what I first thought were plague doctor-type masks, but which turn out to be…uh…black papier-mâché faces with huge bird beaks.

Also, under the influence of the drug that they’ve all been administered, they are persuaded to try and kill themselves in rather gory ways, like walking through some barbed wire (a little nod to Saw and Suspiria) because something something something experiments?

So.

The five of them are being observed and manipulated by Dr. Broward (Brad Dourif) and his crew in search of some kind of tech drug effect? that will be sold to other countries? I was mentally checking out by this time, so I may have those details wrong.

At the same time this is happening, an actual supernatural being starts taking over the bodies of the freshly dead folk and the doctor and his pals scramble to get everybody out of there. The doctor argues with the military people in charge, and they argue with him back, and nobody wants to take any responsibility and nobody wants any of the blame and this old spirit with yellow contact lenses tries to take over Broward’s body and I’m suddenly exhausted just typing this paragraph.

Dourif is, as usual, the best thing in this flick. He is sincere and a little bonkers, and brightens up the room whenever he is in it. Just about everybody else gives odd, stilted line readings that don’t sound natural and taxed my patience. The special effects are very cheap-looking, but the gore is serviceable and earned the movie a tiny bit of respect from me, which it immediately squandered with dialogue, or acting, or pacing, or any other number of things.

Five Stereotypes In Search Of An Interesting Plot might be a more accurate title for this movie.  Uncle Mike sez walk away and don’t look back.