Asylum of Terror

This is the most memorable film I have ever seen. I have always enjoyed bad films, and this is the pinnacle.... I don't believe you could make a film less good.

The acting is bad, really horrible... REALLY atrocious, with actors looking at the camera, reading cue cards (those that could read), monotonous delivery of lines without any emotion whatsoever. It is hard to believe that any one of these actors have ever even seen a movie.

The lighting seems to have been done with 40 watt light bulbs and flashlights. You can't see anything much of the time.

The sound is the most fascinating part of this film, and the most difficult to relate to you. Sound effects seem to have been done by pre-schoolers. Sound quality is reminiscent of the cassette recorder I had in 1972... if you held it under water.

The plot is non-existent. There really isn't any story at all. At first I thought the director was trying to make a 'B' movie spoof like Evil Dead... Quickly I realized that this was an actual attempt at creativity and horror. I spent the entire rest of the film with my mouth open in absolute awe of this remarkable failure.

I highly recommend you see this film, and I assure you that you will remember it the rest of your life.

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.

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

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.

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.