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.

Deck The Halls (2006)

Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick star in this disappointing Christmas comedy as two neighbours who end up upsetting each other. It's a tale of escalating rivalry that's been done a number of times before (in a number of better movies) but it suffers from having central characters that it's hard to care for and being more predictable than a Christmas cracker gag.

Broderick plays Steve Finch, an optician, a pillar of the community and an all-round good guy. Kristin Davis plays his wife and they have two normal kids, one teenage daughter (Alia Shawkat) who is unhappy while she tries to show how she's growing into a woman and one younger boy (Dylan Blue) who acts more depressed in the run up to Christmas to bag himself some better presents. Christmas is a busy time for the Finch family with a lot to do and traditions to uphold. That's all thrown into disarray by the arrival of a new neighbour, Buddy Hall (DeVito). Buddy has his lovely wife (Kristin Chenoweth) and two stylish and beautiful teenage daughters (Kelly and Sabrina Aldridge). While Steve and Buddy don't exactly hit it off right away, things start to get a lot worse when Buddy gets the idea in his head to decorate his house with enough Christmas lights to enable his house to be seen from outer space.

Written by Matt Corman, Chris Ord and Don Rhymer, Deck The Halls is almost consistently unfunny. Broderick and DeVito aren't served well at all by the script. I get the point that the characters are supposed to become blinded by their single-minded quests for their own interpretation of Christmas perfection but it's a shame that they had to be assholes for almost every scene. Luckily, the women fare much better and Kristin Davis and Kristin Chenoweth have a few good scenes together and make up for the irritation of the men. To be fair, DeVito has moments when he actually manages to do okay but Broderick never gives anything more than a very weak rehashing of his performance in Election. He was good in that movie, thanks to the obsession of his character being ever so slightly understandable, but it doesn't work this time around.

Director John Whitesell fumbles everything from start to finish. The movie should kick into gear when the two main men meet up near the start but, instead, it starts to sink down into a quagmire of its own lazy mess. The set-pieces in particular (a family photo that's interrupted, a trip to the family Christmas tree lot, an attempt by Steve to cut the supply powering the lights of his neighbour, a speed skating race) are all disappointing and end up boring the hell out of the viewer instead of raising the entertainment levels. Which makes this movie far from the top of the Christmas tree.

4/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deck-The-Halls-Danny-Devito/dp/B000V7ZMKU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354372181&sr=8-1