I bet it would be a lot of fun to make one of these low-rent cheese ball horror films that populate the metaphorical bins of Amazon Video. You get some buddies together, track down a few sets, and just start filming, knowing you are in no way attempting to render a masterpiece.

My guess is that this is how “Healing Towers“ originated.

What’s the premise here? A doctor of some sort (get this: his last name is actually Healer) played by William McNamara, who I thought was fantastic in the 90s serial killer film Copycat, has developed a radical technique to “cure mental illness.“(Which mental illness? All of them?)

This doctor is a madman. I won’t explain the technique at the heart of the story, but suffice to say it involves people being murdered. (They say it’s not real therapy until someone is dead.)

Our two protagonists—a podcast journalist and a cop who searching for his lost daughter—start to suspect something terrible is happening in the building where Doctor Healer operates. This rundown multistory structure somewhere in LA is called Healing Towers.

One funny thing: every time the setting switched back to the building, there was always an exterior shot. Kind of reminds me of what they used to do in the FRIENDS sitcom, as if we’d suddenly forgotten what Monica‘s apartment building looked like.

There’s a nice little twist at the end when the full backstory of one of the characters is revealed.

While almost all the components of this film—the acting, the set design, the cinematography, etc.—were middling at best, it still kept me entertained. In a way, that’s a greater triumph than successfully making a great film with Al Pacino and Francis Ford Coppola.

Best line: “This is how we bring peace to troubled minds.”