Roses Have Thoughts

There are bad horror films, and then there are films like Doom Asylum a cinematic exercise in juvenile absurdity that confuses gross-out humour for genre satire and substitutes irony for effort. Directed by Richard Friedman, Doom Asylum attempts to combine slasher conventions with camp comedy but mostly succeeds in producing an incoherent, intermittently amusing mess.

Let’s be clear: I didn’t expected a film called Doom Asylum to be a masterclass in cinematic subtlety. But there’s a difference between low-budget charm and sheer laziness. Even by the forgiving standards of ‘80s B-movie horror, the film stumbles in almost every department, writing, pacing, acting, and editing barely holding together its skeletal narrative with clunky exposition and jagged scene transitions.

The plot, or rather, the loose assemblage of scenes meant to resemble one follows a group of stereotypical teenagers and a trashy punk band who decide to hang out in a derelict mental asylum, only to fall prey to Mitch Hansen (William Hay), a former lawyer who survived a car crash and now lingers in the shadows, performing amateur surgery on intruders. There’s a backstory here, but it’s dispensed in such a haphazard, tongue-in-cheek way that it feels more like a parody sketch than a foundation for horror.

Patty Mullen (better known from Frankenhooker) plays dual roles with a winking campiness that is one of the film’s few redeeming qualities. Kristin Davis, in her screen debut, appears more embarrassed than terrified, though one can hardly blame her given the material. The dialogue is a sludge of juvenile jokes and groan-worthy puns, delivered with varying degrees of enthusiasm, or in some cases, confusion. Meanwhile, the killer’s “zany” one-liners fall flat, lacking the wit or menace of the better slashers that inspired them.

Friedman’s direction, while clearly limited by budget and time, leans too hard into the DIY aesthetic. Gore effects are amateurish and repetitive, and the punk band subplot, presumably intended as comic relief, is a shrill, unwatchable distraction. The film lurches between awkward attempts at humour and tedious kill scenes, never quite landing on a consistent tone. The result is a 79-minute runtime that feels considerably longer.

Yet, for all its faults, and there are many, Doom Asylum has cultivated a minor cult following. There is something weirdly hypnotic about its refusal to take itself seriously. For fans of so-bad-it’s-good cinema, it might offer a guilty pleasure or two. But for most viewers, this is a film better left buried in the VHS graveyard or Blu-Ray in this case..

In the end, Doom Asylum is a disorganised, barely coherent mess that struggles to entertain even ironically. Two stars only for its inadvertent camp value and the curiosity of seeing Kristin Davis before Sex and the City.

IMDB