Doom Asylum (1988)

Doom Asylum is not a very noteworthy film. It’s a cheap ‘n’ cheerful slasher that throws any sense of believability or logic out of the window early on and the death scenes range from the careless and ineffective to the impressively bloody. But there are still things to enjoy, especially for the less discerning slasher movie fan.

It starts with a man (Michael Rogen) and a woman (Patty Mullen, making her feature film debut) driving along in high spirits. And then they crash. The woman dies, the man ends up horribly disfigured and on a mortuary slab, where he scares some workers by sitting up and being decidedly not dead, despite looking very much like he should be. Fast forward a number of years and there’s a group of young(-ish) folks heading to an abandoned asylum for a good time. They include the daughter of the woman we saw die in the opening scenes (also played by Mullen), which makes our killer very interested in them. Oh, there’s also a trio of females already in the asylum, making “music” and not looking to welcome anyone else to their private practice area.

There’s a lot to laugh at here, both deliberately and accidentally, and director Richard Friedman certainly tries to keep things moving along swiftly enough to distract from the many negative aspects (such as a lot of the acting on display and the inanity of much of the script, by Rick Marx). The characters are generally quite irritating, which is more of a problem during the first third of the film than it is once the killing really gets underway, the killer is neither menacing enough to make things tense nor amusing enough to make things funny, and the audio levels are all over the place, an obvious side-effect of the superquick shooting schedule (this was a film shot in days, not weeks).

Mullen does well (although her finest hour was just ahead – Frankenhooker) but it’s also the case that she seems a lot better in contrast to the rest of the group; Kristin Davis (who tries hard but can’t overcome the lines fed to her by the script), William Hay, Kenny L. Price, and Harrison White. Rogen has fun as the baddie, no matter how good or bad his mask is looking in each scene, and Ruth Collins manages to compensate for her dialogue and delivery with a great dollop of attitude informing her every moment.

You could close your eyes and find at least 20 movies better than this, whether you're browsing online or scanning your own movie collection, or reading a book about the slasher flicks of the 1980s. But that doesn't stop this from being a fun experience, mostly for all the wrong reasons . . . but sometimes for the right ones.

6/10

You can buy the blu here.
Americans can get it here.