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In a distant, spooky, ill-defined
past, a mysterious and creepy psychologist named Doctor
Burke was getting tired of his ice pick lobotomies and
instead took to carving up his patients for fun, profit
and I’m assuming
sexual kicks, too. Alas, the fun had to stop
sometime, and Doctor Burke was lynched by his own patients.
Cut to many years later only to find that generic asylum
has turned into generic college dorm room – and
thanks to the wonders of its clueless, party-friendly
inhabitants, the ghost of Doctor Burke has been unleashed,
ready to wreck havoc on the newly enrolled fresh meat.
At least, I think it’s the ghost of Doctor Burke,
you see, he has many ghostly powers, such as teleporting
his victims back into their own tragic pasts to break
them down psychologically, or being able to teleport himself,
appearing and disappearing at will, you know, spooky shit.
And yet Doctor Burke seems to have trouble with barricaded
doors, pans and retarded groundskeepers.
 That basically separates Doctor Burke from Freddy Krueger.
Freddy was an unstoppable force of evil… Sleep… Demon… Pedophile… Fire… Demon… Okay,
Freddy Krueger’s general mythology is pretty nonsensical,
but at least you couldn’t stun him by hitting him
in the head with a pan. Freddy doesn’t die by getting
stabbed in the head, Doctor Burke does. Let’s not
ever forget that Freddy doesn’t launch into an absurd,
touchy-feely speech before each kill scene talking about
his victim’s feelings. What we have here is a film
attempting to create a new killer who can’t
even decide what his own rules are.
For those who were waiting for David R. Ellis’ follow-up
to Snakes on a Plane, look no further: Asylum is here,
direct-to-video and ready for your viewing pleasure. If
you’re on the fence about Asylum, let me be the
one to tell you that this film features a spooky, middle-aged
groundskeeper who warns its teenage protagonists about
the possibilities of shit hitting the fan. Yes, it’s
that kind of movie.
 Let me also be the one to break it to you that Asylum is
basically a beat-by-beat recreation of many Nightmare
on Elm Street films, only in an asylum-turned-college-dormitory
setting. And we’re not talking the prestige first
film, the excellent Dream Warriors of
the so-bad-it’s-utterly-fascinating-on-a-Freudian-level Freddy’s
Revenge, no; I’m talking full on, balls-out Dream
Child and Final Nightmare-era Elm
Street films. It’s nutty, it’s retarded,
it’s ill conceived, but, sadly, it isn’t as
fun. Yes, I said Dream Child was fun,
not good. In fact, it’s my least favorite
of the series, for the record, but it’s still more
watchable than Asylum.
I would create a horror movie new sliding scale featuring Asylum at
the far, far end of it, but I can’t because I’ve
also had to sit through Insanitarium.
 Presentation
Let’s address the elephant in the room because
I don’t feel that many DVD reviewers are willing
to point out how douchebaggy it is for FOX to send out
bugged DVD-R screeners. And it’s just not smaller “indie-“minded
sites like DVDINMYPANTS.COM – go to any DVD
review site, and you’ll find a nice-sized chunk
of people saying the exact same thing: “I cannot
properly evaluate the presentation of this DVD because
Fox has sent me what amounts to bootleg wares.” Not
only would they be absolutely correct, I am going to
take the same exact route: I cannot properly evaluate
the presentation of this DVD because Fox has sent me
what amounts to bootleg wares.
 And it’s completely reasonable when you think
about it – FOX wants to protect their shitty property.
If they were really smart, they’d start dropping
discs off at the steps of ATMs for free and harassing
Sylvester Stallone, Damon Packard-style.
All I know is that the film was sent to me on a DVD-R
that doesn’t even take up half of the disc’s
space. The entirety of Asylum takes up
roughly 2.3 gigabytes of a 4.39-gigabyte disc. My only
hope is that FOX was classy enough to send me a rewritable
DVDR so I can replace it with something much more important,
like pornography. Then I’ll mail it back. Hope you
like Eurocreme videos, FOX.
 Extras
Due to the nature
of the disc, I expected to be getting just the film itself
but it turns out that the retail disc for Asylum comes with the same exact
specs of the screener I received: nothing at all. Boooooooo!
The Bottom Line
The
copy of Shutter that Fox sent to
me was scratched up and unplayable. Asylum came
in without any problems whatsoever. I still feel wronged
that both discs didn’t come broken in dozens
of small, edible pieces.
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| Asylum |
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| 1.5 |
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| Feature -
Generic clunker. |
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| Video -
Not available for evaluation. |
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| Audio
- Not available for evaluation. |
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| Extras -
Not available in general. |
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