EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

This is directed by Jay Woelfel, who has made a ton of movies, but perhaps is best known for Beyond Dreams Door.

In his director’s notes for this, he said: “Asylum of Darkness originally came about directly from the release of my first feature film, Beyond Dreams Door, made in my hometown of Columbus Ohio and released in 1989. The sales reps for that film claimed to want to make other films with the team that had made that film. So I embarked on a journey of writing long treatments for film after film for them, I think six at least. One of these was/is Asylum of Darkness . They, the sales reps, liked the elements in Beyond Dreams Door that questioned what was real and what wasn’t. They encouraged me to do something like that again saying “that is what you do best.” So I wrote a 30 page treatment, not about Dream reality, but in this case Insane Reality. A main character who is insane and knows that most of what he sees is insane. A key element to this premise being that, what he doesn’t know, is that insane people actually see beyond what we would call daily reality. Only they can see into a supernatural insane reality of shapeshifting demons that move behind the scenes of a sane person’s view of life. I liked the faceless “ghosts” that appear in Japanese ghost stories and those would be our main character’s chief rivals. The reps said that in the treatment, they couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. That was my whole point.”

Shot on 35mm, starring the same star from Beyond Dreams Door — Nick Baldasare — and having a plot that has so many twists and turns that it packs ten movies into its two plus hours, if this came out from Neon or A24, people would be obsessively masturbating over it to the point that you’d wonder how a movie could be that good. But no, this is a movie made by someone they’ve never heard of, hiding in the mom and pop video store that is Tubi, collecting virtual dust while lunatics like you and me are about to obsessively masturbate over it.

Or maybe you’ll feel like this reviewer, who said, “…one of the most schizophrenic films I have ever seen. Everything about it, from the acting to the directing to the music and everything in between, feels like everyone involved kept changing their minds every other day about what kind of movie they wanted to make.”

Dwight (Baldasare) is trapped in a mental institution as he’s committed murder but his lawyers got him a not guilty by means of insanity plea. There, he becomes friends with Van Gogh (Frank Jones Jr.), a man who removes his eye when he sees something that he can’t handle, and is treated by Dr. Shaker (Richard Hatch), who sometimes appears to be a skeleton. He escapes, running across the road and causing a crash that causes his spirit to cross over with a rich man named Artimus Finch.

He soon falls in love with that man’s abused wife Ellen (Amanda Howell) and takes over his life, taking on the vices and behaviors of someone who he wasn’t born as while Finch dies inside Dwight’s body. There’s also Detective Kesler (Tim Thomerson), who he may or may not have hired to find out what is going on.

You can add might or might not to everything in this movie, as characters change motivations, friends become enemies, enemies become friends and it gets a lot Lost Highway and I say that not because this is indebted to that film but because I have no other handle to hang this on, a film that juxtaposes its lead character being devoured by a zombie while Tiffany Shepis is all flirty with him as she’s dressed for a funeral. And who is Shepis, the woman who visits him every day while he’s losing his mind in the hospital? Who is good? Who is bad? Is anyone?

Originally released in 2012 as Season of Darkness before being revised in 2017 as Asylum of Darkness, this was shot in Ohio and edited in Los Angeles. It feels like it came from the 1990s, where you would have found it two minutes before the video store closed and then tried to tell all your friends about it but couldn’t find a copy anywhere to prove that it was real. I feel the same way now as I’m watching it online, so that should give you an idea of just how singular this is.