Inoperable (2017)


REVIEWER RATING: 
6/10


This review is very challenging.

I am happy to see Danielle Harris back as the scream queen we’ve all known and missed. And this premise of being stuck in a parallel universe is interesting (think of Groundhog’s Day but as a completely heart-stopping nightmare.) However, some portions were very tough to get past, and I don’t say that squeamishly.

Amy (Harris) is in a horrible traffic jam. More like a parking lot on the highway. Soon after we first see her in the non-moving Corvette, she opens her eyes in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV, unaware of how she arrived. Through the next 5 minutes, we get to watch Amy express her fear through a crazy monologue of….”hello?” Yes, that’s it. Over and over and over again…hello? Hello? Amy wanders from room to room, hallway to hallway, and keeps asking “hello?” Its mind numbing, irritating as hell and I was close to stopping Inoperable on minute eight.



However, it turned into a series of Amy blacking out in the hospital, waking up in her car, and then reverting back to the bed where she begins to wake up regularly, and sets out to figure this puzzle of her reoccurring day out. While passing the various tv monitors, the breaking news story is an evil storm racing towards her city with plenty of damage in its way. Does this storm carry any supernatural powers such as a portal into a 3rd dimension?

Plain and simple, Amy is just having a bad day (or umm…nightmare). One minute, she walks unnoticed by hospital staff and watches bizarre and torturous procedures being conducted on patients. The next minute, she is being chased by orderlies who have been conducting vile human experiments on these patients.

When Amy runs around a corner and into the waiting room on one occasion, she meets Ryan (a young security guard) and Jennifer (a pretty blonde.) Ryan brought Jennifer to the hospital for a reason, and they become intrigued by Amy’s outburst that something bad is happening in the building. We soon discover that Ryan and Jennifer have been stuck in this tumultuous reoccurring nightmare for years. Amy is their only way out…if she dies in this house of horrors, it will become like one of Dante’s circles of hell for all eternity.



The routine not only becomes redundant, but consistently boring. Unlike Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day, Amy doesn’t make the same effort to change the pattern with hopes of getting all three of them out alive. So just when I planned to write this off as a good idea, poorly executed, I am treated to an intriguing twist and within the snap of a finger – Inoperable earning an additional star. Amazing what a little mental mind fuck can do to an audience.

Just like The Purge, Inoperable sounds so much better on paper than the big screen translation. The delivery lost many points as I continued to watch the same characters go through the same hum-drum timeline in what could have been a better flushed out plot. It was as if they were oblivious to the power they had to change their destiny and made me want to scream. Thankfully, the story development took a separate path and saved it from an average horror film to a more amusing one.
OVERALL: 
Just like The Purge, Inoperable sounds so much better on paper than the big screen translation. The delivery lost many points as I continued to watch the same characters go through the same hum-drum timeline in what could have been a better flushed out plot. It was as if they were oblivious to the power they had to change their destiny and made me want to scream. Thankfully, the story development took a separate path and saved it from an average horror film to a more amusing one.


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