You wanna do something? Do something to me.
Main Cast: Ben Rodgers, Kate Riley
Director: Brant Serson
You know what the world REALLY needs? More found footage movies about a team of paranormal investigators with a YouTube channel going into an abandoned, supposedly haunted, sanatorium (see also: asylums and hospitals). It worked for GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, right? And it seems simple enough to execute. Why isn’t everyone doing it?
Because it’s a lot harder than it seems. If you need more proof, watch the latest addition to Tubi, 2013’s SANATORIUM, written and directed by Brant Serson, a man who puts so much space between projects (SICK OF IT ALL: THE STORY SO FAR in 2001, BLACKBALLED in 2004, SPLINTERHEADS in 2009, this one in 2013, and his most recent as of this writing in 2026, HAUNTING ON FRATERNITY ROW in 2018) that you’d think he’d use that time to make the best damn movie he could.
And maybe he is. But if this was the best he could come up with in 2013, I have to wonder what the hell was he doing the rest of that 3 years and 11 months.
In this one, GHOST HUNTERS or GHOST TRACKERS or whatever the hell they call themselves, made up of husband and wife team Tyler (Ben Rodgers) and Samantha (Kate Riley), along with token other woman Bridget (Megan Neuringer), token meathead Mark (Don Fanelli), and token African American guy Cole (Justin Purnell), have been cleared to spend the night inside the abandoned Hillcrest Sanatorium. The caretaker reminds them repeatedly that it was later turned into a nursing home, so it’s now the abandoned Hillcrest Nursing Home.
This particular building’s history is that, on New Years Eve of 1955, a man killed three children and then hung himself, and the GHOST STALKERS’ mission is to capture some kind of activity for their 100th episode.
The characters are inconsequential, the “paranormal activity” is minimal, and the effects are standard fare for this kind of movie. Now, I will say the location had a few sets that were very similar to a “ghost hunt”, with several very large quotes around it, that my wife and I have done over the years, so it did bring back some creepy memories of our own, but then a woman steps on a nail, shows us her bleeding foot, and then spends the rest of the movie very obviously NOT limping and in pain, running here and there with a definitely infected wound in the bottom of her foot as if nothing happened, and the mood was killed.
Through dropped lines here and there, we learn the GHOST TRAPPERS have somehow made it to 100 episodes without ever having actually recorded any ghostly activity. When things finally start happening for real around them, they’re so thrilled to actually have anything, we’re subjected to another 10 minutes of them playing and rewinding the same vague audio clip over and over until we just don’t care anymore. Instead we’re checking the time to see how much of this thing we have left. For the record, it was about 20 minutes.
It must be a blast to have a free weekend and have the run of a place like this to do what you want. It would be more fun if it weren’t in the dead of winter with all those broken windows and no heat in the old building. I’m sure Serson and his crew had fun making this one, but my wife and I definitely did not have the same amount of fun watching it as we did similar, and better-executed fare like GRAVE ENCOUNTERS and its sequel. Hell, even LAST RADIO CALL had more interesting twists than this one, and that movie was terrible. I won’t say SANATORIUM was the worst thing we’ve seen by a long shot, but I also can’t really recommend seeing it, even for free on Tubi.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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