Doom Asylum

I bought Doom Asylum a week or so ago, specifically because I saw that Patty Mullen starred in it. I didn't expect much out of the movie, but still bought it just because it's the only film she's done aside from Frankenhooker. As an added bonus though, it turns out that Doom Asylum is actually pretty great.

Doom Asylum was made for only about $82,000 and shot in a dozen days. The director and producer explain on the DVD that it was just a sort of stab in the dark to try to make a little money from the booming VHS horror market. Somehow instead they managed to strike gold accidentally anyway and produce something with so much charm that it has no problems getting past its shortcomings.

To start with, the movie was set in an actual abandoned asylum, the Essex Mountain Sanitorium (which has been completely demolished and turned into a public park as of 2002).


Then there's Patty Mullen herself. I'm not sure what it is about her, maybe just the fact that I've seen her wonderful performance in Frankenhooker already... but there's just something so endearingly weird about Mullen's characters. Here, Patty actually plays two characters. One of them is Kiki, an odd young girl who calls her boyfriend "mom," and the other is Judy, Kiki's mother. The DVD case might have Kristin Davis's name all over it, but Patty Mullen is definitely the real star actress here. I certainly hope we get to eventually see her in another role. She's got a couple of kids these days, but surely she's not that busy.

Next, there's Kristin Davis... but once again, you'll be very aware of that fact if you have the DVD; her name is plastered all over the packaging now that she's gotten famous.


She's actually more enjoyable here than I was expecting, but then I've never really seen her in anything else. The director talks about how he could tell that she was very talented and was going to go far... but I think he's probably just saying that because that happens to be what actually happened with her. The other actors aren't all great, but there are several shots where Kristin's smiling or laughing (not that I blame her) at what's going on while serious things are supposed to be happening, and she's the only one I saw doing that sort of thing.


Also, whoever did the costume design for Patty and Kristin must have used the chipettes from Alvin and the Chipmunks as inspiration.


I would really like to believe that that didn't happen by accident. Just look at those glasses... and they're even wearing the same colors...

On to the killer, nicknamed "The Coroner." He never actually was a coroner, in fact he's an ex-lawyer. He just hangs out at the asylum so he has access to all the medical instruments to use in his killing.

It seems like it's pretty hard to come up with an original slasher villain that isn't just another guy in a mask, but his faceless thing actually works for me. Still though, out of all the slashers, he's got to be the worst at slashing.

Bad Slasher.

He hardly even tries to go after anyone. His victims have to either walk right up to him, or just stop, sit down, and wait to be killed. Take Kristin's death scene for example.

The death scenes all pretty much follow that sort of pattern. This killer's got no advantage except that his victims are all such eager volunteers.

The teens all spend a great deal of time wandering around the complex corridors, and this would ordinarily serve to build tension, but it never does because we know exactly where the killer is the whole time. You see, he only slashes part-time. While the teens wander around, he just goes back into the tunnels and watches TV.


As if that wasn't enough, when we cut back to him to see what he's watching, his screen is actually shown full-screen on ours for minutes at a time. As it turns out, when they finished their first cut of the movie, it just wasn't long enough, so they then spliced in all the footage of the killer watching classic (read public domain) horror movies.


Although there are a few minor annoyances, and sometimes the movie just seems to get so caught up in its own fun-momentum that it forgets that it's supposed to be going anywhere at all with the story, in the end this doesn't really matter because Doom Asylum is just so damn charming and entertaining.

The DVD isn't too hard to find right now, so if you've not seen Doom Asylum yet, I'd suggest you remedy that right away.

Available on Amazon: Doom Asylum (Uncut)

Frankenhooker

Sometime between Basket Case and Brain Damage, Frank Henenlotter tried to make a movie called Insect City. When he went to pitch the idea for funding, no one was interested, so he made up Frankenhooker on the spot and pitched that instead.

In Frankenhooker, Frank Henenlotter shows us that the winning formula to make a romantic comedy is simply: young love + mad scientist + crack cocaine + blowing up prostitutes.

Anyhow, we start the film off with Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) playing with his pet eye/brain creature. It doesn't seem to work quite right, so Jeffrey is forced to perform a quick bit of brain surgery... which of course involves a hammer.

This thing is straight out of The Crawling Eye

We're introduced to his girlfriend Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) just in time for her father's birthday party. She wanders around the snack tables eating pretzels and talking to whoever's around about her problems with losing weight. Soon enough she unveils Jeffrey's gift, a remote controlled lawn mower, and is quickly devoured by it. This movie is wasting no time at all, we're barely at the five minute mark.

Elizabeth's death inexplicably causes someone to squirt a lawn gnome with chocolate syrup.

After introducing Elizabeth just in time to kill her off, the movie shifts back to Jeffrey. He's moping in his room, but at least he's stolen Elizabeth's head to keep him company. He talks to his mother, has a romantic dinner with Elizabeth's head and begins his decent into monologuing madness. From this point on, unless the plot requires that Jeffrey talks to someone about something, everything he says is pretty much just him talking to himself. Since he does this pretty much constantly, Jeffrey is essentially the narrator for the remainder for the movie. But before he leads us to the next plot point, our narrator has to pause the film and take a drill to his temple because it "helps him to relax."

Once all of that is finished, Jeffrey decides to go out looking for hookers for body parts to rebuild Elizabeth. He heads out to browse the local hookers, and ends up taking them all back with him. Too bad for the crack-addled hookers, Jeffrey's recently whipped up a batch of super-crack.

As the movie explains, when it comes to super-crack, "Just say no."

With his hotel room now full of ladylimbs, Jeffrey now has plenty of stuff to reconstruct Elizabeth. As for the leftovers, he sticks them in his freezer along with his... purple.

Pretty soon, frankenhooker is born and completely steals the show for the remaining 30 minutes of the movie. She stomps around the town in her Frankenstein platform shoes, spouts all the catch-phrases from all of the hookers earlier in the movie, and sexes an old guy's head off (he doesn't seem to mind this at all).

Jeffrey eventually catches up to her (but only because she breaks down and needs repairs) and takes her back to his place. Elizabeth's memories and personality come back and they live happily ever after... but then there's a twist... and then another one.

As usual, Henenlotter sticks to his specific brand of comedic horror and hits it out of the park. I've watched this 3 times this month and I think I've got to agree with Bill Murray who famously said, "if you see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker."

Available on Amazon: Frankenhooker (Special Edition)