“Prison of the Psychotic Damned” – Still
Our Town, On Screen – by M. Faust Artvoice
“Location, location, location” are, as everyone knows, the three most important things in buying real estate. But when you want to make movies in a city as far from Hollywood (both literally and metaphorically) as Buffalo, it assumes a different meaning.
Location is what distinguishes Prison of the Psychotic Damned from a never-ending slew of low-budget horror films (and with a title like that, what else could it be but a horror movie?). It was filmed almost entirely in the Buffalo Central Terminal, the astonishing Art Deco building built in 1929 that has haunted the East Side since it was closed in 1979.
The plot of Prison moves from the Terminal’s closing to the 1950s and has it do temporary duty as a poorly supervised holding center for overflow patients from a hospital for the criminally insane. (You have to take the invented history of Buffalo with tongue in cheek, like a reference to the “State University of New York at Cheektowaga.”) Those tortured souls, it is said, still haunt the place, leading a team of ghost hunters to spend the night there in an attempt to contact them, with predictably dire results.
