Dr. DeWalt flips through his patient’s chart. “We started you off with the Percosan,” he explains. “But one of the common side effects of Percosan is hysterical delirium. So we were forced to take that down with the Silozan, which unfortunately made you too relaxed. So we had to crank you up a notch with the Demerolstyrate, which raised your heart rate to an almost lethal level and your body temperature to…135 degrees! Wow, thank God for ice chips, huh? That Demerolstyrate really is a wonder drug. In any event, we were forced to pump massive doses of sodium lescola into your system, which wiped the slate clean and brought you back to square one–reluctant and angry.” The doctor approaches his patient, who’s tied to an operating table with a rubber ball strapped into his mouth. “Since you refuse to respond to your medication, and due to certain budgetary and time restraints, we have decided to move on to”–he brandishes a huge electric drill–“cranial drill therapy.”
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Welcome to the Association of Psycho-Manipulation, the nightmarish mental hospital in Dan and Paul Dinello’s 12-minute, black-and-white comedy short, Shock Asylum. Made for $6,000, with a cast and crew drawn from Columbia College and local improv theaters, the film plays like a dramatization of The Bell Jar starring the Three Stooges. Mr. Gaxton (Paul Dinello) reports to the hospital for a routine psychiatric evaluation; after failing an oblique question-and-answer session with the crisp Dr. DeWalt (Stephen Colbert), he’s strapped into a bathtub and an orderly drops a portable radio into the water. When that fails to cure him, Gaxton is covered with tinfoil and plugged into an electrical outlet; his scalp bursts into flames. Yet for all the film’s gruesome slapstick, the dialogue hews uncomfortably close to the self-serving rhetoric of the mental health industry: “We’re just trying to help you, Mr. Gaxton!”
Shock Asylum is also reminiscent of Second City improv (Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert, both Second City veterans, now appear on the Comedy Central program Exit 57). Colbert and the Dinellos wrote the script during a four-day bull session, acting out scenes and seizing on any idea that made them laugh. But the last minutes of the film take a left turn into Bu–uel territory: out in the woods, the fleeing Gaxton encounters a woman in an evening dress who’s set up a little living room with a phonograph; they share a dance together before the woman spins out of the frame and is replaced by Dr. DeWalt, drill in hand. “We wanted to have some moment of relief and lightness and pleasure, and a little joy,” says Dan. “We didn’t really define what it was. In one of our heads it was a hallucination, but the woman is actually in the insane asylum earlier. At another point we had her actually having escaped and created a sort of camp out there, but ideas got fused. We always have problems with endings. Often we don’t decide until the very last moment before we shoot, or we shoot multiple endings.”
