SHUTTER ISLAND: nightmares in a damaged brain

Director Martin Scorsese's first foray into the horror genre is a major disappointment. SHUTTER ISLAND trots out every cliche in the "How to Make a Horror Thriller" handbook with not even a single smudged fingerprint to indicate this is the handiwork of the greatest living American film director.
If it weren't for the presence of the (still) unfeasibly babyfaced Leonardo DiCaprio I'd swear I was watching the 1966 cinematic bastard lovechild of William Castle and a young Roman Polanski. Imagine "Cul de Sac" meets "Strait Jacket." 

With a blaring discordant soundtrack and cast of demented murderous souls locked away on a remote island institution and guarded by a staff whose own sanity appears dubious, I half expected a late era Joan Crawford or Bette Davis to loom out of the darkness on the other end of one of the pairs of arms reaching through the bars to grab at the hero as he stumbles down a damp, dark corridor in a mental hospital.
SHUTTER ISLAND is derivative, hokey, overblown and peopled with stock characters. There's Ben Kingsley as the smooth head doctor whose professions of concern for his patients may or may not be sincere; Max von Sydow as the German-accented psychiatrist who may or may not be a Nazi war criminal; Ted Levine as the warden whose honesty and openness may be concealing a sadistic dark side, and DiCaprio as the outsider, menaced on all sides and starting to doubt his own sanity. 
In the hands of William Castle this would all add up to a taut, entertaining B-movie chiller but it's not worthy of a director of Scorsese's stature. His 2004 film "The Aviator" for which he was undeservedly Oscar nominated looks like "Raging Bull" compared to SHUTTER ISLAND.