Eloise

If I keep watching movies set in abandoned, haunted insane asylums, with a history of horrific abuse by the medical staff, I'm never going to get the help I dearly need.

At least the four idiots in this movie don't go snooping on a dare or to shoot a documentary. Instead, Jacob learns his father committed suicide and left Jacob a large inheritance. If Jacob can find his aunt's death certificate, and she died in the aforementioned asylum. Or he can wait seven years to have her declared legally dead. Her death certificate is for some reason locked up in the annex in what's left of the place, and requires a court order to be unsealed, which will take at least six months.

(Admittedly, I'm not up on estate law, or whatever this would fall under, but can't Jacob have half the inheritance, since it's only him and his aunt as heirs, and the lawyer holds the other half while they wait the seven years? Then once she's legally declared dead, he gets the other half?)

Jacob's friend Dell (played by Brandon T. Jackson, aka Alpa Chino in Tropic Thunder) has his own money problems, and little aversion to crime, and suggests they just break into the annex and take what they need. They find a guy named Scott (played by P.J. Byrne, who I know as the IRS agent who gave Bruce Campbell a hard time on Burn Notice that one time), who is an aficionado on the asylum, and convince him to guide them. Except Scott's maybe a little autistic, or just exceptionally childlike for some reason, and his older sister Pia (played by Eliza Dushku, the actual reason I watched this movie) insists on going along.

Naturally things go disastrously wrong, as they do. I'm not clear what exactly is happening. Sometimes they see ghosts in the burned out remains of the annex as they search through it at night. Other times, they appear to have been somehow transported back to the past, where they run afoul of the head doctor (played by Robert Patrick as a creepy, sadistic guy who makes jokes about gagging patients so their screams don't disturb everyone). He's big on Confrontation Therapy. You're afraid of snakes? It's Fear Factor, we're dumping you in a container of snakes. Don't like small spaces? We locked you gagged in a morgue drawer. Shit like that. 

(It's especially funny that at the end, the film says it is dedicated to all the people who worked at the Eloise Mental Hospital where it supposedly takes place. OK, you made them look like a bunch of monsters, heck of a dedication.)

The timeloop gives Jacob the opportunity to learn the horrifying truth of his own lineage, and possibly alters the timeline in someway involving a crazy bum with a grocery cart. (I'm less clear on that part.) The pacing is kind of a mess - it never gets going at a fever pitch, but it feels like it grinds to a halt for Jacob's big reveal - and if it hadn't been free to watch through Alex' Amazon Prime account, I wouldn't have bothered.