Sundowning

 

Sometimes you just really need to watch zombies eat people. 

Thus do you discover a 2013 star-studded Asylum Studios movie made for the SyFy Channel.

Quick Plot: The dead have risen on a warm evening in suburban California. Patrick Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall!) is trying to get his daughter Tracie and her pal Rachel over to his neighbors' panic room, but a detour leaves them trapped in a cemetery. Back home, wife Birdy (Daryl Hannah!) is struggling to stay calm with her dementia-ridden mom (Shirley Jones!). Their neighbors, the Maddens, are dealing with interior conflicts, stirring up dad Joseph's worst instincts involving the non-American help. 

Yes, much like owning a yacht, the rules of cinema tell us that a homeowner with a panic room is probably a wealthy, racist jerk, and that's the case here. That would be Joseph Madden (Alan Ruck!), who locks his superstitious housekeeper inside and moves his wife and sons to safety.

Elsewhere in town, Officer Lopez does a terrible job of not saving anybody. 

Welcome to Zombie Night! Directed by Feast's John Gulager (son of genre royalty Clu), Zombie Night is one of those mid-tier Asylum movies. Not a mockbuster, not an entry level CGI tale of random monster words mashed together, but an original(ish) story with modest ambition and an even more humble budget. 

It's passable. 

I grew up in the heyday of video store zombie scavenging, which (de)volved into very cheaply shot made-for-video-store-zombie-obsessed scavengers. At a certain point, anyone with a camera (and eventually just smartphone) could make and even sell their response to Diary of the Dead. I say all this to justify why Zombie Night, for me, a 42-year-old lifelong horror fan with an abundantly rich access to the catalog, is perfectly fine. 

Reviews of this movie are not kind. Maybe those writers came in with higher expectations based on the cast, or a chip on their shoulder because of the studio association. I'm not here to tell you that Zombie Night is a hidden gem or anything worth your full attention for 85 minutes. But it moves quickly, looks fine, and kept me mildly entertained. 

High Points

Nobody is swinging for an Oscar here, but by golly does it make a difference when a movie, no matter how little ambition it has, casts professionals who know their way around a set

Low Points

I welcome zombie movies finding new tics to their version of the undead, but Zombie Night's ending throws a random fact about the monsters that comes out of nowhere and feels not just dumb, but like something that we should have been told 85 minutes earlier in order to have a better understanding of the stakes. Maybe I'm holding the screenplay to an Asylum studio movie to a bit too high a standard?

Lessons Learned

If you can see it, you can sew it! 

All men, aside from Anthony Michael Hall, are rats

Never put a talking toy inside a casket

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you were to go by the reviews on IMDB, Zombie Night is the Plan 9 From Outer Space of the aughts. Its 3.5/10 rating is .2 worse than Death Count, WHICH IS A VERY BAD MOVIE. Zombie Night is not worse than Death Count. It's a perfectly passable cable horror movie that gets its minimum wage job done. Nobody needs to watch it, but if you're desperately seeking the undead, it's a watchable option. 

Eye've Had Enough

The Asylum is a film studio with a very particular reputation, but I've often defended their original films. Yes, their more famous mockbusters and sharknados are silly and more often than not, incredibly lazy, but here and there, their fresher low budget productions offer pleasant surprises. 

Hold Your Breath is not such a case.

Quick Plot: Back in the 1950s, a preacher named Van Hausen became a prolific serial killer with a signature move of gouging out his victims' eyeballs. He even manages to pluck out a few more on the day of his execution by electric chair.

In the present day, we meet a batch of impossibly good-looking and even more impossibly brain-damaged young adults reuniting for the first time since high school for a weekend camp trip. I can't possibly be expected to know or care about their names, so henceforth, we'll refer to them as Sun-In Dye Job Guy & His Horny Girlfriend, 

Mean Blonde, Mean Blonde's Nicer Brunette Sister, Tall Guy, Stoner, and Guy Who Looks Like Sun-In Dye Job Guy But Thankfully Wears Glasses.

They're all awful, and I really can't tell if that was intentional. 

The trip takes a turn when they pass a cemetery and Stoner is too busy stoning to heed Mean Blonde's superstitious warning to hold his breath and avoid being possessed by the soul of someone buried inside. So guess what? Stoner gets possessed by the soul of the eye-popping Van Hausen while the rest of the gang is investigating the abandoned prison that hosted his bloody electrocution.

Oh, and by "investigate" I obviously mean that Sun-In Dye Job Guy and His Horny Girlfriend have sex in the prison morgue while Mean Blonde and her Nicer Brunette Sister playfully tie Tall Guy to an electric chair as a storm breaks out. 

I spent the first half of Hold Your Breath hoping it was a self-aware joke, and the second half with the sad understanding that it was indeed a real attempt to make a horror film. An incredibly dumb and more importantly, unpleasant one at that.

We've all seen Shocker. Even the most diehard Wes Craven fan will say Shocker is very, very bad. But by golly, it's Citizen Kane when placed next to Hold Your Breath. 

The young cast is very good-looking. Their characters are jerks, and dull ones at that. The violence is mostly cheap Asylum CGI-based, which looks as bad as you'd expect, until you get to the graveyard finale and watch a floating ghost fight straight out of the Disney's Haunted Mansion ride and realize, "oh, it's even worse than I expected." The highlight for me was the prison morgue sex scene not because it was a prison morgue sex scene but because it was scored by a song called "Hold Your Breath." 

I'm nothing if not easily entertained by the obvious.

High Points

I don't know, I guess I enjoyed a hand mixer to the eyeball kill because sure, why not gouge an eyeball out with a hand mixer

Low Points

As a lifelong horror fan, I'm not one to complain about gratuitous nudity because I simply don't have the Energizer Bunny-esque funnel of energy it would demand, but Mean Blonde's Nicer Sister's murder feels incredibly icky in its topless execution

Lessons Learned

If you're in the middle of nowhere with a guard tower and fence, you're probably near a prison

Selling weed is one way to pay child support

I genuinely did learn that "Dance Hall" was slang for death row, but what Hold Your Breath taught me was that prisons go ahead and manufacture official signs for such a thing

Rent/Bury/Buy

I don't know what anyone can get out of Hold Your Breath. It's mean, ugly, and pretty terrible. But hey, we're horror fans, and for some of us, that kind of description means an automatic queue add. It's on Peacock if you're one of those weirdos. 

I'm King of the Asylum!

You've probably heard of a movie called Titanic. It won a few Oscars, earned a little bit of cash, gave the world more Billy Zane, and just might have made 8th-grade-Emily cry a few teenage tears. 

The odds are lower that you ever bothered to check out 2010's Titanic 2. 

What, you didn't know they made a sequel?

The beauty of history is that it can't be trademarked, so legally, there was nothing stopping The Asylum from its title (heck, it's the name of the BOAT, see?). Shockingly, I, like most of humankind, have also not seen Titanic 2, but it takes more than Tubi ads to stop me from checking out its 654th entry!

Wait...they didn't make 666 Titanic movies? They just decided to call Titanic 3 Titanic 666? 

HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING?

Quick Plot: 110 years after the ill-fated voyage of a certain big boat, some ad wizard came up with a very dumb idea: let's do it again! 

Titanic 3 sets sail under the dutiful care of Captain Rhoades. Also on board: a gaggle of influencers, some original Titanic artifacts (because THAT'S what you want to see on a luxury cruise) and the bloodthirsty descendent of the ship's doomed captain. What could possibly go wrong?

As you might guess, a lot! Ghosts, icebergs, and of course, bargain bin CGI that makes you realize those powerpoint presentations you've been cutting and pasting with watermarked Google image searches aren't so bad after all!

When it comes to The Asylum Studios' output, you're likely getting one of two things: lazy filmed-in-a-week greenscreen slobber with a goofy title or concept, or a simple micro-budget genre flick that makes a valiant but doomed effort to create an actual movie. I've never seen a GREAT Asylum film, but I've watched my share of passable to GOOD ones (said with an enthusiastic, surprising tone that sounds like I'm shouting a question). 

So where does Titanic 666 land? To use an apt visual metaphor, I'd say it's capsizing quickly towards the greenscreen slobber. Its setup is perfectly fine, but there's just no OOMPH to the actual action. Save for a tragically underused Annalynne McCord (more on her later), the performances are disappointingly bland. Any sinking ship thriller should at least have the sense to give us the broad ensemble strokes so we have some sense of place and doom when the horror is going down, but Titanic 666 just kind of drifts from moment to the next. It's not shocking when you assume a movie like this was written/storyboarded/filmed/edited in less time than it took Celine Dion to record the dance mix of My Heart Will Go On, but you know, it would just be nice to still be entertained. 

High Points

When five minutes in, Annalynne McCord switches from human voice to influencer vocal fry and it's the perfect sign of how much she knows exactly what she's doing. Say what you will about the um, spoken word poet with a very clear theory on Vladimir Putin's experiences with his mother, but you know what? Girl can serve this type of ridiculous character like no one else. She has impeccable timing for this kind of role, and even manages to convince you there's an actual person underneath the filter. 

Low Points 

(the SPOILER EDITION)

So then Titanic 666 has the nerve to kill her in the first act? And no, this isn't a Drew Barrymore-arguable-cameo-in-Scream situation. The movie opens its story as if Mia will be one of many Poseidon-ish team leads, and just ... disposes of her without nearly enough fanfare. It's a shame not only because McCord is so much fun in the role, but also because no other character comes close to registering as either likable or enjoyably hatable 

Lessons Learned

Mediums and cosplayers demand extra security

If you're going to display valuable 100 year old artifacts on a vessel filled with thousands of (often drunk) civilians, maybe it would be worth another $10 to put them behind locked glass

State of the art engines do not overheat

Rent/Bury/Buy

Nobody goes into Titanic 666 expecting to be scared or impressed, but it would have been nice to have been slightly more entertained. I've seen far worse from the Asylum, but aside from this movie's concept and the all-too-brief antics of McCord, there's just not much to remember about Titanic 666...other than the fact that someone made a movie called Titanic 666. 

Plane-tergesit

 

Logistically, it must be pretty tough to set a movie entirely in an airplane. You can't just use one out of rotation as a set, and building interiors that need to feel cramped but offer enough room for a camera crew can't be cheap. So while the glorious possibilities of claustrophobic tension and fiery crashes should be a no-brainer for the horror genre, I imagine budgetary restrictions limit our output to the handful of plane-set genre flicks out there. 

It's a shame, because as the overrated Snakes On a Plane, underrated Flight of the Living Dead, and barely rated Quarantine 2 show us, trading out a summer camp or apartment complex for 45 ton capsule of metallic engineering will always make things a bit more interesting. 

Quick Plot: A credits sequence gives us glimpses of a serial killer's souvenir collecting, but put a pin in that: it's time to board the redeye from LAX to JFK.

We get sprinkles of conversations that introduce us to the passengers and crew: a newlywed couple with incoming in-law drama, a returning army veteran ready to reunite with his family, an armed air marshal, rookie co-pilot, sweet flight attendant, sassy flight attendant, and to kickstart the plot, token "there's a man on the wing of the plane!"-guy whose fears seem completely out of line.

I mean, there's no one on the wing of the plane: it's a batch of female ghosts haunting the airplane restroom, of course!

Welcome to Flight 666, the rare original non-mockbuster produced by The Asylum Studio, with a cast and crew of Asylum veterans who clearly know how to make a movie on the cheap. It will likely shock you to know that Flight 666 is, well, fine. 

There's nothing terribly scary about the CGI toilet ghosts, but when you see "The Asylum Studio" float by in the intro, savvy genre fans will inevitably lower their expectations at the same ratio that the price of a water bottle increases the minute you step foot in an airport. 

But for all of their Atlantic Rims and Titanic 2s, any Asylum film's quality is ultimately in the hands of its filmmaker, and on more than a few occasions, the people behind the camera clearly care about the final product. Flight 666 is directed by Rob Pallatina, an editor who has 71 credits to his name since 2021. Take THAT, Thelma Schoonmaker!

Yes, those credits include titles like Pool Boy Nightmare and 2, 3, & 5-Headed Shark Attack.

And yes, I instantly Googled "4-Headed Shark Attack" and thank the kind folks at Reddit for answering what must be a commonly asked question.

I can't speak to Pallatina's other 5 directing credits (which seem to involve more Nazis and killer doctors than shark heads) but as a debut, Flight 666 suggests solid workmanship. He wrangles a large cast to deliver perfectly decent performances, and makes acceptable use of B-level CGI. The screenplay (by Jacob Cooney and Brandon Stroud) is shockingly patient, taking a good hour to reveal its ghostly secrets and giving us something of a surprise with its villain reveal. 

No, Flight 666 isn't Shakespeare or, say, Hereditary, but it's an adequate time waster that makes the best of its limited resources. There aren't many other haunted-house-on-a-plane movies, so if that's an itch you've had, this might be the only viable scratch. 

High Points

It's so easy to rile up your conflict by including the token a$$hole in your ensemble, so credit to Flight 666 for managing to avoid the usual eye-rolling arguments and allow its cast to mostly function as we'd imagine human beings would in the situation of, you know, being trapped on a haunted plane

Low Points

The flip of the above statement is that none of the passengers are especially interesting

Lessons Learned

First class passengers are extremely cooperative and will have no objection to moving back to coach if the air marshal asks nicely

The word "terrorism" just gets everyone worked up

A copilot's most important job is to relay the information that's been spoken out loud on the intercom to the pilot sitting in the same small space as that intercom

Brace!

Rent/Bury/Buy

Flight 666 isn't necessarily a good movie, but it kept my attention for 90 minutes and even managed a few surprises along the way. One could do worse (especially on Amazon Prime).

Everybody Walk the CGI Dinosaur

Seeing The Asylum logo at the start of a film typically promises a few things. The movie you are about to watch has been made cheaply. It has been filmed incredibly quickly. If the title includes a 'Vs.', you can probably bet on seeing an '80s pop icon or two in the cast. If the title is suspiciously similar to a recent, fairly successful mainstream film, the odds are high that the movie you are about to watch will not be particularly good (with the occasional Paranormal Entity-esque exception, of course).

Now let's say you see The Asylum trademark but do NOT see a Vs., an '80s pop icon, or any clear and obvious connection to a modern blockbuster?

Well sometimes, those are okay. Not great--never great. But here and there, a studio that prides itself on low cost and high quantity can, with a thoughtful writer or director on board, produce something of genuine entertainment.

Quick Plot: A tense (just kidding) prologue gives us a full-on Jurassic Park-ish intro as we see a bunch of expendable science types slaughtered by a dinosaur puppet. Just when you get excited by the idea of puppets in an Asylum film, our credits roll and the threat of bargain-priced CGI becomes real.

Treat Williams, a man for whom my lust has never waned (Hair's Berger then, Handsome Dad In Asylum Movies now), is Gabe Jacobs, a widowed firefighter with a teenage daughter named Jade. As you would expect from any Asylum movie where a teenage daughter to single dad is a character, Jade spends the majority of her screentime rolling her eyes and texting because, you know, TEENAGERS.

Gabe's brother or friend or daughter's former babysitter or something is a security guard at a fancy high school auditorium/Biotech company of sorts hosting a black tie presentation. CEO Ronny Cox is proudly announcing to a whole bunch of extras that in addition to curing burn victims, his research company has now brought dinosaurs back to life. Naturally, this leads to a bunch of terribly rendered CGI creatures breaking out of terribly rendered CGI glass cages.

The moment I knew I kinda liked Age of Dinosaurs was quite clear. As chaos reigns inside the theater, what with the virtual dinosaurs leaping and biting and hundreds of spectators yelling and dying, the action cuts to the lobby where Jade has been sitting in order to text (TEENAGERS!). When a dinosaur leaps at Jade, she lets out an understandable scream. Cut, of course, back to the loud, death-filled interior of the auditorium where Gabe immediately stops, his brother/friend/security guard/friend not quite explained in the film screenplay makes eye contact and shouts "I heard it too!"

As an owner of four cats, I know whose meow is whose, at least most of the time. Is it wrong of me, however, to assume that it's hard/impossible to identify an individual's scream, particularly when there are a whole lot of other shouts/dinosaur roars/bodies being crunched by roaring dinosaurs noises going on?

Asylum is not a studio known for its quality, but it generally understands its audience enough to know what they need. When it's going for high profile concepts, I usually find the style a little too obvious (sorry, Sharknado) but some of its quieter output can be rather fun. In the case of Age of Dinosaurs, director Joseph J. Lawson isn't working with the best material and resources (you know there's a problem when even the news reporter character stutters) but he finds the right light-but-not-obviously-ridiculous tone to make the 90 minute running time what it should be: dinosaurs amok.

This is the kind of film that has Treat Williams earnestly beg a helicopter pilot to "Step on it!" and, even better, "aim for that pterodactyl!" Naturally, his zinger when the aiming pays off? 

"Bye bye birdie."

And that's not even The Winning Line!

High Points

This is also the kind of movie that has extras flee a theater, only to focus on a large chubby man when a shrill female scream sounds. I approve

Low Points

Sadly the energy of Age of Dinosaurs withered away once it rounded the hour mark. Maybe it was the clear budgetary limitations that became more obvious once the action moved out of a confined space (observe the 'dinosaurs are hunting humans in the mall!' which really just turns into 'people run out of a mall/now a dinosaur is running through an empty mall!' effect), but the film just kind of flatlined after its main novelty wore off

Lessons Learned

Scientific intellectuals really like their Jameson(s)

Guns don't kill dinosaurs. Axes and hockey sticks kill dinosaurs

Never drive on a quarter a tank of gas. You'll come to regret it when chasing dinosaurs on the streets of LA

When a teenager passes through your bar and shouts "Run!" you should listen

The Winning Line

"Now there's a woman who has curves in places most women don't even have places!"

I think this is a compliment, but gentlemen, a word of advice from a lady: don't ever use it to impress one

Rent/Bury/Buy

As you would expect from anything produced by The Asylum, Age of Dinosaurs isn't actually very good. That being said, this is a fun enough time killer that could easily make you smile here and there while folding laundry or reorganizing your DVD collection. Hit it up on Instant Watch the the moment strikes.