Asylum of Terror

The acting is bad but even worse is the absolutely horrible sound quality of the video. I can at least enjoy a bad, poorly acted movie for laugh value, but the sound in this one makes the dialog (such as it is) often unintelligible or garbled. Take a cheap microphone and put it inside of a trash can, then have the actors stand 50 feet away ... that's what this one sounds like.

In this world of community theater throwbacks, the man who has the camera pointed at him the most is king. Here's the plot...random people in random locations getting killed randomly. The audio comes to us direct from Peanuts. Dean, the "hero", is the towns top haunted house worker, making his pay only slightly lower than that of a late night bus stop janitor. Of course, this makes him highly desirable. When he finds the first murder, the person he is with wants to find the murderer to stop him. Dean's first reaction is to throw up, cry, then wet himself. Eventually, after a lot of nothing happens, they find the killer. Again, the girl he's with wants to stop the killer as it's two on one. Our fearless hero's argument against this is that the killer is amateurishly wielding a small icepick. Dean waits until the killer is distracted by trying to kill an doughy ham of a child, then makes his move with a chainsaw. Oh yeah, there was something about a fire and a ghost or something, but in the end it doesn't matter, nor do we care

As a summary review, the film was good once all things are considered. It was shot on a shoe string and seemed to include a good bit of improv. All in all, not a bad flick for the B-horror genre. George Demick did a decent job with so little resource.

This is, to date, the worst film that I have ever seen. And I have seen some very, very bad films.

The sound is largely inaudible - I could only understand about 10% of the dialogue - but despite that I suspect the "plot" was non-existent. The little dialogue that you could hear was inane. The incidental "music" is awful, Casio-keyboard style noise, that sounds like a blind man with excessively long fingernails and frostbite trying to play a miniature piano. Keyboard music in horror/suspense films can be great - see Assault on Precinct 13 for an example - but it does require at least a basic talent and ability. Neither are on display here, and so the music, such as it is, just grates.

The video quality is abominable - sub-VHS even on the DVD. Much of the film is shot in the dark, so that you're straining to see if anything's happening or not - or you would be straining if you cared.

There is no decipherable plot. A madman simply enters a "haunted house" visitor attraction, converted from an old prison asylum for the criminally insane, and starts to kill people. Lots and lots of people. In barely-visible ways. Because of the sheer body count, it is impossible to imbue the victims with any character. You see a couple of them making out, or having sex, before they are killed, but that's about as far as the character development goes. There seems to have been some effort made about halfway through the film to explain the killer's motivation; he was apparently an ex-inmate, and there was some sort of fire. Towards the end of the film the killer seems to have the impression that he is starring in his own horror movie, which is one of a few attempts made by the filmmakers to be postmodern and subversive. Perhaps if I could have heard the dialogue in these scenes it would have improved the movie slightly, but I seriously doubt it.

The blood and gore effects are utterly unconvincing for the most part, although there is one chainsaw murder which worked pretty well. One or two of the killings are barely visible, and it wasn't until the final scenes, where each murder was replayed, that I even realised that a murder had taken place in one of the earlier scenes. The fake fighting is laughable.

The film's total lack of budget is clear from the opening credits, which are pixellated and misspelled. The DVD doesn't even have a menu, let alone chapter selection or any extra features.

This film is awful. No acting ability or creativity was on display. No effects talents were used. There was no originality, but plenty of cliche. Kudos to the filmmakers for killing one of the annoying kids off though - child murder is unusual in the horror genre, even at this, most unconvincing, level.

Having said that, the film was so bad it was funny. It was good to finally see a film so bad that it beats Bram Stoker's Legend of the Mummy to become the worst in my collection. And it's kind of nice that so bad a film has secured a release - it makes me wonder what some people in York Entertainment were thinking, and more to the point what the people who agreed to stock this film in the shops were smoking. It's worth watching just to establish a baseline of how bad films can be, as a means of judging other films. But that's the only reason to endure this.

Aargh. Where to begin? I shall attempt to communicate in brief and unrelated fragments (as the movie frequently did): bad acting, a feeble attempt at special effects, horribly filmed, dialogue muffled (not that it would be worth hearing), and absolutely no plot whatsoever.

For an especially torturous evening, pair this classic with "Ax 'Em", another fine film from our friends at York Entertainment.