- When Ellen Cole goes undercover at a mental asylum to rescue her brother, she is unaware that she is about to encounter her worst nightmares, for St. Mariahs Hospital for the criminally insane holds a dark secret. Deep in the dark recesses of the Asylum, Vampires have been caged for experiments and on this festive night the vampires will rise to draw blood again. Whilst in the hospital ballroom the party guests are blissfully unaware of the horror heading straight for them. With only the help of a whimsical police bobby and a pathalogical killer can Ellen escape the insanity of the Asylum?—Janice de la Mare
- Ellen Cole [Adrienne Carlyle] has spent two years with "the agency" in order to fill in as a relief nurse for one night at St Mariah's Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In reality, Ellen is an investigative reporter who has heard rumors about patient abuse at the asylum. She also has a personal reason for wanting to go undercover...her brother Peter [Nicholas Levene] has been incarcerated there for the past two years after being convicted of murdering their parents. Ellen believes that he is innocent, and it is her plan to save him while also exposing the patient abuse.
Ellen's arrival at the asylum starts out fairly normal. Because the function room is being decorated for a Christmas party, she is sent around to the back entrance where she is greeted by a security guard. She breezes through the security examination, providing him with her fingerprints, palm print, hair sample, urine sample, retinal scan, and buccal cells for the DNA record. She is then introduced to the asylum director, Dr Charles Leonard [Robert Cargill], and is escorted by his secretary Lizzy [Lauren Bigby] to the nurse's station on B wing.
Leonard stays behind to speak with the psychiatrist, Dr Eska Librus [Lucy Casson]. Librus wants more time with her patients and is concerned because Leonard has decided to take Peter Cole tonight. After she threatens not to f**k him for two weeks, Leonard gives Librus another night to work with Peter and decides to use the next inmate on the list. Meanwhile, Ellen goes looking for Peter. Peter doesn't seem to recognize her but warns her about cell #8 just before Librus and an orderly come along and take Peter with them. Ellen does manage to get some photos of another orderly beating up Stiles [David Horton], one of the inmates said to be a serial killer who suffers from blackouts and can't remember his deeds.
While Peter is examined by the seductive Dr Librus, Ellen goes in search of cell #8 and sees Leonard using his passcard to open the door. Ellen quickly grabs the door before it closes completely and slips through. Cell #8 is actually a dimly-lit staircase that leads to another block of cells in the basement of the asylum. The block is lit only by candles and is guarded by the weirdly-grinning Nurse Caldwell [Michelle Esclapez], so Ellen makes up a story about an incident upstairs. Caldwell goes to help, and Ellen takes the opportunity to snoop until she is forced to hide at the sound of someone approaching. It is Leonard with head orderly Sturges James Macleod] and inmate Cedric. They put Cedric in a cell with another inmate. As Ellen watches from around the corner, Cedric is attacked by a vampire. Immediately after the vampire has fed, Sturges zaps him with a cattleprod and leads him down the hall. Ellen follows them to a laboratory where she watches in horror as Leonard dissects the vampire alive and cuts out his heart. He hands the heart to Sturges and warns him to have it tested immediately.
Ellen doesn't know it, but Leonard is trying to isolate the DNA responsible for a vampire's immortality. It lies dormant in vampires, he believes, but becomes easier to isolate when enhanced by the endorphins released just after feeding. Leonard has imprisoned several vampires and has been providing them with inmates to feed on, after which he dissects out the heart and sends it off for analysis. Unfortunately, the analytic window is very short, and he has not been successful at getting it analyzed in time. He hopes that this time they will be successful.
Meanwhile, Nurse Caldwell has been pimped by ghettofab inmate, Hamish MacDuff [Lamin Kamara], to have sex with Peter. Afterwards, she goes into the ladies' room to freshen up but is suddenly wracked with pain, her eyes begin to glow red, and her canines elongate as she turns into a head vampire, having been bitten by one earlier that evening when she attempted to change a light bulb in the basement cellblock. After feeding on an inmate and a janitor, she heads back to the basement.
Leonard has found out about Ellen snooping in the basement. He orders her locked in the nurse's station while waiting for the police to arrive. Ellen is happy to know the police have been called and plans to tell them everything she saw in order to expose Leonard's practice of using the asylum inmates to feed his real prisoners...the vampires...so that he can dissect out their hearts. Leonard laughs and threatens to expose Ellen as a case of demential paranoia but, when his test analysis comes back negative, Leonard realizes that he'll have to try again, and Peter is next on the list. In order to buy time for Peter, Ellen presses the control button that automatically opens the doors to all of the inmates' cells, except for head vampire Stelinger [Fred Sandy], who is kept captive in a cell with unopenable bars.
Meanwhile, the party has gotten off to a rip-roaring start, thanks to all the planning by Leonard's wife, Ruby [Veronica Hempsey]. After a row with both Lizzy and Ruby, Leonard returns to his office where he gets trapped by Hamish MacDuff, who is POed because Leonard denied his release earlier that evening. Hamish asks Leonard to take a closer look at his release paper and papercuts Leonard's eyeballs with it. Two police officers -- Sergeant Rayleigh [David Farrington] and his rookie partner P C Williams [Elliot Hill] -- have arrived and been sent around to the back entrance. After providing the security guard with a urine sample. Rayleigh and Williams go looking for Dr Leonard but are approached by several inmates loose in the halls. They hide in a linen closet where they encounter Pooman, an inmate who eats his own poop. Pooman wipes some of it off on PC's collar. As disgusting as it is, it saves Williams' life when he is later attacked by a group of vampires who can't take the smell.
With no one watching over either inmates or vampires, the vampires ascend from the basement to Ward B and begin to feed on the inmates, turning them into vampires, too. The security guard gets beaten to death by inmates while he's trying to protect his urine samples. Sturges is beheaded by a bunch of inmates who use his head to play kickball. Dr Librus, working late in her office, has been forced to hide in her closet when two inmates break into her room and begin to ransack it. After that, she is bitten by a vampire.
Meanwhile, Ellen and Stiles, the serial killer, have joined forces and are trying to find the way out. They go down into the basement through #8, but find the next door is locked. While Stiles tries to find something to break it down, Ellen is hypnotically drawn into the cellblock where head vampire Stelinger is still trapped by the unopenable bars. His desire for Ellen allows him to slip through the bars. Just as he's about to bite Ellen's neck, Stiles knocks him in the head with a crowbar, which they then use to break down the door. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the door leads only to a closet, but the closet contains wooden crucifixes and bottles of holy water. Even after what she has seen, Ellen denies that there are such things as vampires, even as Stelinger sneaks up on her and tries again to bite her neck. Stiles beheads him with the crowbar.
The crosses and holy water come into immediate use as they notice four vampires bearing down on them. A cross, a crowbar, and several sprays of holy water later, they subdue the vampires and find their way back to the #8 door. They race up the stairs and run into Williams in the hallway. Together, the three of them make their way along the blood-splattered corridors, Stiles happily chopping up a few vampires along the way and Ellen finding her brother. Unfortunately. Peter has been turned into a vampire. As he advances on Ellen's neck, he confesses that he was the one that pushed their parents off the cliff. Just as he's about to kill Ellen, too, she beheads him with a knife tossed to her by Stiles.
Eventually, Ellen, Stiles, Williams, and the remaining vampires and inmates make their way into the function room where the band is playing, the tables are covered with food, the guests are dancing, and Ruby is drinking. Vampires and inmates alike begin attacking the guests, blood flows freely, screams ensue, Ruby has sex with a lobotomized inmate, Ellen stakes Nurse Caldwell with a wooden cross but not before Caldwell bites Ellen, turning her into a vampire. In another room, one of the inmates, wearing a urine containment bucket over his head, lights a match in a room where there is a gas leak. Suddenly, the entire facility explodes into flames.
Survivors: Williams and Nurse Caldwell. Well, maybe just Nurse Caldwell. [Original synopsis by bj_kuehl]
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