Doom Asylum

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Doom Asylum

#1 Post by zedz » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:22 pm

Image
If you thought Sex and the City 2 was a stomach-churner, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Long before playing one of Carrie Bradshaw’s best gal pals, actress Kristen Davis found herself up against an altogether different kind of horror in 1987’s Doom Asylum: a riotous mix of gore, gags and goth girl groups galore!

When a group of horny teens wind up on the grounds of a creepy abandoned asylum, they think they’ve found the perfect place to party. Little do they know that inside the building’s crumbling walls lurks a freakishly deformed maniac, driven to madness by the tragic loss of his fiancée in a car accident. With an array of grisly surgical tools at his disposal, it’s only a matter of time before the youngsters begin meeting various splattery ends at the hands of the ghoulish Coroner.

Helmed by director Richard Friedman (Scared Stiff and Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge), and also starring Penthouse Pet of the Year 1988 Patty Mullen (Frankenhooker), Doom Asylum combines outlandish gore and a wise-cracking villain to create one of the most wildly entertainingly blood-spattered slashers of the late ’80s.

CONTENTS
  • Brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative
  • High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
  • 1.85:1 and 1.33:1 versions of the feature
  • Original uncompressed PCM mono audio
  • Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • Brand new audio commentary with screenwriter Rick Marx
  • Brand new audio commentary with The Hysteria Continues
  • Tina’s Terror - a brand new interview with actress Ruth Collins
  • Movie Madhouse - a brand new interview with director of photography
  • Larry Revene Morgues & Mayhem - a brand new interview with special make-up effects creator Vincent J. Guastini
  • Archival Interviews with producer Alexander W. Kogan, Jr., director Richard Friedman and production manager Bill Tasgal
  • Still Gallery
  • Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Justin Osbourne
FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Fully-illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Amanda Reyes

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domino harvey
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Doom Asylum

#2 Post by domino harvey » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:32 pm

zedz wrote:
Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:22 pm
It seems like this title missed having its own thread created (or at least I couldn't find it).

I just came on here to see whether anybody else thought this might be, among some very stiff competition, the worst film Arrow has ever released.

It's an absolutely terrible film that somehow thinks it's hilarious. If it were just a horror movie, it would be merely miserably mediocre, but it's the incredibly lame comedy that really sinks it. There's an amateurish commentary track that's desperately trying to promote it as 'subversive', while devoting equal time to making boob jokes (ugh), and the standard defence of the film in all of the extras is "actually, it's supposed to be funny," without anybody realising that this is both bleeding obvious and the central failing of the film.
Very happy to say this is not among the 143 80s Slashers I've seen (so far). I've never listened to one of the Hysteria Continues' commentaries, but I've read the write-ups on their site and for so-called experts in the slasher genre, none of their "critics" seem capable of actually discerning differentiation or points of interest in these movies. Like, maybe I can see it better because I don't much like these movies, but then again they seem to like them even less than me yet sell themselves as authorities? But what they're peddling is a shallow brand of knowledge from what I've seen

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cyclometricus
Joined: Mon Sep 17, 2018 4:20 pm

Re: Doom Asylum

#3 Post by cyclometricus » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:38 pm

I can't come up with any logical defence for "Doom Asylum." I agree with all of your criticism. I can't speak to the commentary track since I haven't yet listened to it.

But.

For some strange reason I find myself cheering the movie on, as if it were the last to cross the finish line at a marathon, having taken more than two days to finish.

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Grand Wazoo
Joined: Thu Jun 21, 2007 2:23 pm

Re: Doom Asylum

#4 Post by Grand Wazoo » Wed Oct 31, 2018 8:38 am

zedz wrote:
Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:22 pm

I just came on here to see whether anybody else thought this might be, among some very stiff competition, the worst film Arrow has ever released.
Is this film worse than Microwave Massacre? If so, damn....

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tenia
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Re: Doom Asylum

#5 Post by tenia » Wed Oct 31, 2018 8:47 am

Or than Satan's Blade ?

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domino harvey
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Re: Doom Asylum

#6 Post by domino harvey » Wed Oct 31, 2018 11:36 am

Hey now

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tenia
Ask Me About My Bassoon
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Re: Doom Asylum

#7 Post by tenia » Wed Oct 31, 2018 1:36 pm

Well, at least, Satan's Blade has this hilariously shot extra feature, which I don't think Doom Asylum has.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Doom Asylum

#8 Post by zedz » Wed Oct 31, 2018 3:15 pm

I don't think I've seen Satan's Blade. Microwave Massacre is truly awful, but it didn't have the smarmy smugness that is this film's defining feature and adds an extra dimension of awful to everything.

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swo17
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Re: Doom Asylum

#9 Post by swo17 » Wed Oct 31, 2018 3:19 pm

I'll second Satan's Blade as charmingly bad

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domino harvey
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Re: Doom Asylum

#10 Post by domino harvey » Wed Oct 31, 2018 3:22 pm

Satan's Blade is so inept on every level yet it shows quite plainly how threadbare this brand of independent filmmaking was during the peak of the era that it's never uninteresting regardless. There are obviously much better slashers to see before it, should you need to do that for some reason

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Banasa
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Re: Doom Asylum

#11 Post by Banasa » Thu Nov 01, 2018 11:35 am

Lump in Hellgate as a potential worst in the bin.

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domino harvey
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Re: Doom Asylum

#12 Post by domino harvey » Sun May 26, 2019 8:21 pm

Update: I watched this and other than questioning how I spend my life, I can agree that this was godawful... but I would not rank it even in the top ten worst slashers I've seen by virtue of it being well-lit, having some competent special effects, and featuring a truly incredible Jersey accent from the Final Girl. Intentionally bad movies like this and Troma are tortuous, so I get zedz' aversion, and there's something dispiriting about a bad film that didn't even have aims to be something more than that. Any movie that casts a fake Richard Lewis as the villain is clearly not trying to be anything but garbage, and applauding the film as an achievement of these aims is like cheering on a product tamperer for successfully poisoning bottles of Tylenol. This movie is so fundamentally bad that I am convinced anyone, from any walk of life or career, could have spent an hour with the script and improved it threefold. As is, when the filmmakers are forced to bring in at least ten minutes of screentime devoted to inserts of the baddie watching some rando British horror movies to pad this out to feature-length, that's perhaps a signal that filming should never have started... though I guess that and some other scenes give us an unexpected indictment of civic waste, since apparently the municipality hasn't bothered to stop paying the electric bill at the abandoned hospital for the past decade

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Slaphappy
Joined: Fri Apr 27, 2018 5:08 am

Re: Doom Asylum

#13 Post by Slaphappy » Wed Jun 12, 2019 10:34 am

I liked Doom Asylum. There were no boring characters, gore was good and the fact that it was fully shot in daylight on location in some abandoned hospital made it special. Or maybe it was about Kristin Davis smiling and being a bitch through the movie wearing swimming suit and glasses. Nice and pretty unique looking slasher anyways.

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