When ordering a fried egg sandwich it’s the customer’s pleasure to break the yoke. The same principle holds true that it’s the viewer’s pleasure to wisecrack at a film from the comfort of their own armchair. This may have been Asylum’s saving grace if it weren’t for the fact that the filmmakers had clearly run out of money during production, and were stuck with a serious dilemma. How do they finish the film and make their money back.
Simple. They hired the writer (Chris Mancini) to pen another ‘comedy’ script about the making of Asylum, which centred upon the film’s editors insulting the cast & crew from their editing suite. This makes for one rotten fried egg sandwich that’s spread thick with out of date meta mayonnaise. And it’s a shame because underneath Asylum’s visual food poisoning there’s a solid B-Movie, which is perfect for a group of friends to add their best MST3K style running commentary.
Asylum’s unfinished horror story is straight from Roger Corman’s well thumbed playbook. A brooding hostage negotiator (Stephen Rea) and a hard as nails SWAT team commander (Bruce Payne) are sent to an insane asylum overrun by its blood thirsty inmates. They soon find that the Prince Of Darkness is pulling the strings, and Rea’s the prime candidate to tussle with the horned one, and save the day.
It’s the filmmakers sheer laziness in trying to craft a grind house parody from a work print and a lacklustre comedic voiceover which makes Asylum almost unwatchable. A gimmick that cruelly undermines all of the cast & crew’s hard work to make a convincing low budget horror film. What’s left on screen is a pyrrhic victory that solves the filmmakers dilemma of getting the film into the market place and recouping their costs. And everybody is left with egg on their face.
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