THE ASYLUM – Or ‘Exeter’, if you must. Marcus Nispel has a few credits to his name – his noughties refashionings of ‘Texas Chainsaw’ and ‘Friday The 13th’ were both good, I think. On the other hand, ‘The Asylum’ is just garbage. I had better mention that it’s actually at least moderately entertaining garbage, so it has that in its favour, although it sort of doesn’t deserve to. Why do I sound so offended? ‘The Asylum’ resembles the scrapings of the most generic noughties teen-centric commercial horror mashed together with no regard for even basic comprehensibility, structured around a tick list of genre cliches that it tries to disown by resorting to patronising nod-winkery (at one point, they use an app based on ‘The Exorcist’ – f@ck off). Its characters are bland and irritating, and what happens to them is uninteresting until the film gets truly laughable. Said laughability aside, there is no imagination on display, just a reliance on horror film fallbacks – the abandoned asylum, the kids who wanna get down and party only to fall foul of etc, the dark backstory of forbidden experimentation and so on. I know, I know, how many movies possessing exactly the same traits have I gushed about? Loads, but I’m either basically a hypocrite or ‘The Asylum’ just seemed to get it twice as wrong. No, the real reason I was annoyed, but also the reason why ‘The Asylum’ might be quite interesting in a way, is because I wasn’t expecting a movie with such obvious technical clout to be so badly made. It’s clearly comfortably resourced judging by the roll call and overall ‘look’, but its creative decisions seem to belong to a film from much further down the budgetary scale – like, SOV level. I’m not just talking about the content as per the above. There’s a fundamental incoherence about it that really grates, as if the director, editor, cinematographer and writer were all off doing different films, resulting in a choppy lack of togetherness that after a while starts to fascinate. Other things exert a bit of pull – there’s some tasty gore, the whole thing looks attractive, full of nicely posed scenes of lovingly curated decrepitude and dereliction et cetera, and the flaky plot twists are zany enough. If you can get a few cheap laughs and some cheaper thrills, and I can, maybe that’s enough, because basically ‘The Asylum’ is moderately glossy dreck that somehow feels like it stops short of being an actual movie.
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