Asylum of Terror (1998 Video) User Reviews

MUST SEE - The absolute worst movie ever made

[budkeeton · 1/10 · 21 August 2005]

This is the most memorable film I have ever seen. I have always enjoyed bad films, and this is the pinnacle.... I don't believe you could make a film less good.

The acting is bad, really horrible... REALLY atrocious, with actors looking at the camera, reading cue cards (those that could read), monotonous delivery of lines without any emotion whatsoever. It is hard to believe that any one of these actors have ever even seen a movie.

The lighting seems to have been done with 40 watt light bulbs and flashlights. You can't see anything much of the time.

The sound is the most fascinating part of this film, and the most difficult to relate to you. Sound effects seem to have been done by pre-schoolers. Sound quality is reminiscent of the cassette recorder I had in 1972... if you held it under water.

The plot is non-existent. There really isn't any story at all. At first I thought the director was trying to make a 'B' movie spoof like Evil Dead... Quickly I realized that this was an actual attempt at creativity and horror. I spent the entire rest of the film with my mouth open in absolute awe of this remarkable failure.

I highly recommend you see this film, and I assure you that you will remember it the rest of your life.

Painful to Endure

[mdholman · 1/10 · 4 August 2002]

Aargh. Where to begin? I shall attempt to communicate in brief and unrelated fragments (as the movie frequently did): bad acting, a feeble attempt at special effects, horribly filmed, dialogue muffled (not that it would be worth hearing), and absolutely no plot whatsoever.

For an especially torturous evening, pair this classic with "Ax 'Em", another fine film from our friends at York Entertainment.

The only thing worse than the acting is the sound quality.

[cbehrens-2 · 2/10 · 1 April 2003]

The acting is bad but even worse is the absolutely horrible sound quality of the video. I can at least enjoy a bad, poorly acted movie for laugh value, but the sound in this one makes the dialog (such as it is) often unintelligible or garbled. Take a cheap microphone and put it inside of a trash can, then have the actors stand 50 feet away ... that's what this one sounds like.

Unkind, man. Haunted houses are the stuff!

[shadowmsk-1 · 9 February 2004]

In this world of community theater throwbacks, the man who has the camera pointed at him the most is king. Here's the plot...random people in random locations getting killed randomly. The audio comes to us direct from Peanuts. Dean, the "hero", is the towns top haunted house worker, making his pay only slightly lower than that of a late night bus stop janitor. Of course, this makes him highly desirable. When he finds the first murder, the person he is with wants to find the murderer to stop him. Dean's first reaction is to throw up, cry, then wet himself. Eventually, after a lot of nothing happens, they find the killer. Again, the girl he's with wants to stop the killer as it's two on one. Our fearless hero's argument against this is that the killer is amateurishly wielding a small icepick. Dean waits until the killer is distracted by trying to kill an doughy ham of a child, then makes his move with a chainsaw. Oh yeah, there was something about a fire and a ghost or something, but in the end it doesn't matter, nor do we care

George Demick owes me an hour of my life back

[lycos · 1/10 · 5 May 2004]

This is, to date, the worst film that I have ever seen. And I have seen some very, very bad films.

The sound is largely inaudible - I could only understand about 10% of the dialogue - but despite that I suspect the "plot" was non-existent. The little dialogue that you could hear was inane. The incidental "music" is awful, Casio-keyboard style noise, that sounds like a blind man with excessively long fingernails and frostbite trying to play a miniature piano. Keyboard music in horror/suspense films can be great - see Assault on Precinct 13 for an example - but it does require at least a basic talent and ability. Neither are on display here, and so the music, such as it is, just grates.

The video quality is abominable - sub-VHS even on the DVD. Much of the film is shot in the dark, so that you're straining to see if anything's happening or not - or you would be straining if you cared.

There is no decipherable plot. A madman simply enters a "haunted house" visitor attraction, converted from an old prison asylum for the criminally insane, and starts to kill people. Lots and lots of people. In barely-visible ways. Because of the sheer body count, it is impossible to imbue the victims with any character. You see a couple of them making out, or having sex, before they are killed, but that's about as far as the character development goes. There seems to have been some effort made about halfway through the film to explain the killer's motivation; he was apparently an ex-inmate, and there was some sort of fire. Towards the end of the film the killer seems to have the impression that he is starring in his own horror movie, which is one of a few attempts made by the filmmakers to be postmodern and subversive. Perhaps if I could have heard the dialogue in these scenes it would have improved the movie slightly, but I seriously doubt it.

The blood and gore effects are utterly unconvincing for the most part, although there is one chainsaw murder which worked pretty well. One or two of the killings are barely visible, and it wasn't until the final scenes, where each murder was replayed, that I even realised that a murder had taken place in one of the earlier scenes. The fake fighting is laughable.

The film's total lack of budget is clear from the opening credits, which are pixellated and misspelled. The DVD doesn't even have a menu, let alone chapter selection or any extra features.

This film is awful. No acting ability or creativity was on display. No effects talents were used. There was no originality, but plenty of cliche. Kudos to the filmmakers for killing one of the annoying kids off though - child murder is unusual in the horror genre, even at this, most unconvincing, level.

Having said that, the film was so bad it was funny. It was good to finally see a film so bad that it beats Bram Stoker's Legend of the Mummy to become the worst in my collection. And it's kind of nice that so bad a film has secured a release - it makes me wonder what some people in York Entertainment were thinking, and more to the point what the people who agreed to stock this film in the shops were smoking. It's worth watching just to establish a baseline of how bad films can be, as a means of judging other films. But that's the only reason to endure this.

A Bad Movie For Bad Movie Fans

[mdhockeycop · 4/10 · 6 November 2006]

A terrible movie from start to finish. But it's so bad that I will watch it again and again for a few laughs. It seems like there was not so much a script than an outline and some cue cards. If you are a fan of the badly filmed and poorly acted, then this one is for you. When it seems like the actors are as surprised about the dialog as the people watching, then you know that it's bad. But you can't help but watch, just to see what may happen next. I liked it for the pure entertainment that I got from the actors, and not necessarily for the acting itself and definitely not for the "scares" that a decent horror movie can and will deliver.

A micro budget film with potential

[canadab · 5/10 · 19 August 2002]

As a summary review, the film was good once all things are considered. It was shot on a shoe string and seemed to include a good bit of improv. All in all, not a bad flick for the B-horror genre. George Demick did a decent job with so little resource.

Don't Seek Asylum

[NoDakTatum · 1/10 · 27 November 2023]

There is absolutely nothing redeeming about this movie, and the fact that it was distributed to unsuspecting video stores throughout the country is a testament to the old York Home Video's marketing department more than actual entertainment value. A group of teens decide to tour a former prison that has been turned into a haunted house. A serial killer gets into the prison, he used to be an inmate there, and dons assorted cheap knock-off masks of better known movie slashers. He then kills everyone he can find, as he imagines he is in his own little horror film, and assorted spectators think his real murders are part of the haunted house.

You will forgive the lack of characters' names. I literally only caught two- Dean (Jason Petty) and Mark (Sixx Williams). The sound quality is awful, I think the film makers were using the microphone on the video camera for audio. I am not kidding, I could not comprehend seventy percent of the dialogue here. Everyone sounds like they are talking into tin cans. You really do not need to know characters' names anyway, there are no characters. There is the killer, and the victims. The killer kills the victims. This video seems to have been assembled from a checklist of what normally makes a slasher film work: fake blood, a creepy set, a couple of females willing to take off their tops, an unstoppable killer, and plenty of things to stab with. What the film makers did not do was come up with a decent script or production values. Aside from the horrible sound, the picture is terrible. The director throws in the murder of a child as well, as if he ran out of ideas and was desperate to pad the running time. The video cassette gives an "approximate" running time of eighty five minutes, but my video counter and online says the film runs seventy five minutes. "Asylum of Terror," a terrible title, is a terror of a different sort. This is a film making formula that may have started as a good idea, but quickly was lost by complete ineptitude, from the watery fake blood to the misspelled words in the end credits. For a couple of decades, this film and "Ax 'Em" made up my "worst films ever made" until I laid eyes on "Luna Park." If you like this film, you really are crazy.

Enjoyable Crap-Art!

[scott_beowulf · 10/10 · 20 August 2006]

The negative reviews of Asylum of Terror seem extremely unfair to me. The vast majority of these reviews derides the film for being so poorly made. But poorly made, low budget films are an art form in of themselves. They can be entertaining, funny, and completely accomplish exactly what they intend. If you're looking for Shakespeare, or even Clive Barker, then don't watch Asylum of Terror. If you enjoyed Blood Feast or Color Me Blood Red, you might find Asylum to be worth your time. Personally, I'd much rather watch an H.G. Lewis movie than a Wes Craven movie. Take, for instance, the scene in Asylum where the chubby girl is having sex with a guy wearing a mask. She tells him to keep it on, and, after a bit of moaning, he is killed with a hammer to the face. She nonchalantly walks away, screaming in an unemotional manner, gets turned around accidentally, and is finally drilled to death. If this doesn't bring a smile to your face, you're probably not a fan of low budget horror to begin with. This is a movie that features an awkward killer who is dressed rather nicely, terrible fun-filled acting, a bit of gore, and children getting killed. Accept it for what it is, and you might not be disappointed. Compare it to I Know What You Did Last Summer, and you shame us all.