Investigating The Asylum

Hello readers! Last week I saw a particularly awful film – so awful, in fact, that I have been pondering whether it even deserves a review. The film in question is Jurassic Domination, and there is no way that any of you readers will have seen it. We’re talking about a film so obscure that it doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, and Google cannot find photos for several of its actors. It was clearly made on a shoestring budget, and as such, mocking it for its deficiencies would feel like punching down. In any case, nobody out there cares enough about this film to enjoy it getting blasted – so why bother?

Of course, ending the blog post here would be a terrible letdown. Instead, I went digging for another angle, and almost instantly struck gold. Jurassic Domination is part of a long line of low-budget films made by The Asylum, an American production and distribution company that focusses entirely on straight-to-DVD releases. Their most famous film is Sharknado, which is now something of a “so-bad-it’s-good” cult classic, up there with the likes of The Room. It turns out that The Asylum is a gold mine for unbelievably bad films. This company has produced well over 100 titles since 1999, and is still going strong. How? Brace yourselves…

Introducing: The “mockbuster”

The Asylum has a simple business model. They steal the concepts from an upcoming, big-budget blockbuster, then spew out a straight-to-DVD, low-budget mockbuster. Their films are the Aldi products of Hollywood – similar enough for the consumer to recognise the original name behind the imitation, but different enough for the company to avoid a costly lawsuit.

Over the years, The Asylum has churned out such films as The Da Vinci Treasure, Transmorphers, Atlantic Rim and Android Cop, and they aren’t stopping. This year saw the release of Meth Gator – a shameless knock-off of Cocaine Bear. Indeed, shamelessness is the backbone of The Asylum. Their primary aim is to make money, rather than to nurture creativity, and their business model has been wildly successful.

25 years of filmmaking

In its early days, The Asylum produced and distributed original ideas rather than dubious imitations. Most of these were slasher horror films, but there was also a drama about teen pregnancy and a crime thriller written by Charlie Higson. However, 2005 marked a turning point. The Asylum released their first mockbuster: H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. It wasn’t as if Steven Spielberg could stop them using this title to ride on the success of his film, because the book had been in the public domain for years. It was an easy rip-off with no legal pitfalls, and from then on, The Asylum turned its focus towards manufacturing low-budget, malformed doppelgangers of Hollywood hits.

There is a clear method behind the success of these mockbusters. Plenty of other independent producers have made Hollywood knockoffs in search of a quick buck, but The Asylum is notable in its longevity. Firstly, they lean towards the genres of action, horror and disaster, because these translate the most effectively to international audiences. Disaster films, in particular, are enjoyed the world over, while comedies and dramas are often culture specific. This hasn’t stopped The Asylum releasing several tasteless adult comedies over the years, but disaster movies make up the bulk of their output.

The second and perhaps most important part of their success is the abandonment of artistic integrity. Apparently, it takes them only four months to make a mockbuster, and that is from the initial conception (“should we make a copy of Top Gun: Maverick?”) to its release onto DVD (although Top Gunner: Danger Zone had a theatrical release too). The script is written in 4-6 weeks, and when filming starts, they shoot 12-15 pages per day (typical Hollywood films shoot one page or less). The mockbuster is edited at breakneck speed, and ends up on Amazon just in time to coincide with the cinematic release of its parent blockbuster, in order to reap the benefits of the high-budget advertising campaign.

The art of the steal

For a mockbuster to succeed, the audience must be able to spot it as an imposter, rather than an original in its own right. At Aldi, you are left in no doubt that Nutoka is Nutella, and that Norpak is Lurpak, just at half the price and with twice the palm oil. The Asylum uses a similar approach when naming its films. Many of their titles read like bad puns because they are so similar to the originals (e.g., Sinister Squad, Tomb Invader), while others are funny for their unapologetic Ronseal factor (e.g., Ape vs. Monster as a rip-off of Godzilla vs. Kong). When you sit down to watch a film from The Asylum, you know exactly what you’ll get.

Some of the names are a little uninspired. For example, the knock-off of Eragon is simply called “Dragon” (although part of me loves the lack of effort here). At the other end of the scale, we have Allan Quartermain and the Temple of Skulls, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t – I just can’t – get over the name Allan Quartermain as a stand-in for Indiana Jones. This is actually funnier than if they had called him Pennsylvania James.

NEWSLFASH: I just Googled Allan Quartermain and discovered that he is the protagonist of an 1885 novel by H. Rider Haggard. The character is a professional big-game hunter living in South Africa at the time of the British Empire, so I am sure everything about him has aged perfectly well. He has been portrayed in various films over the years – by Sean Connery and Patrick Swayze, no less – and he is also the protagonist in yet another crappy mockbuster that came out only this year, directed by some guy named Marc Hamill. You couldn’t make this up… Even the director is an Aldi knock-off.

Ghosts of blog posts past

This morning, I discovered something that chilled me to the bone. In 2012, The Asylum made a copy of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus – a film which haunted me for weeks with its eternally rolling donut ship. The mockbuster is called Alien Origin, and somehow, this title makes more sense than the real one. Indeed, one of the reasons that the real Prometheus failed to meet financial expectations (aside from it being crap) was because people didn’t realise that it was a prequel to Alien. However, the folks at The Asylum know exactly what people want to see. They don’t take risks in order to maintain artistic integrity. They play it safe in order to crush creative autonomy.

Unfortunately, Alien Origin was not the only ghost to come back and haunt me. Where The Asylum made just one copy of Prometheus, they made two copies of Moonfall – a film whose impact was felt only when it crashed at the box office. Both Meteor Moon (2020) and Moon Crash (2022) centre around the moon falling towards Earth, and I suspect that this double mockbuster phenomenon only occurred because the original release date of Moonfall was pushed back. Am I going to watch them? Hopefully not. Although part of me is now morbidly curious as to whether I might enjoy the rip-off versions more than the originals.

Not just mockbusters!

Even though The Asylum specialises in mockbusters, they also churn out plenty of original content of a similarly low standard. Virtually all of these films are in the disaster or horror genres, and a baffling number of them involve sharks. The best-known film is Sharknado, which was so successful that it had five sequels, but there are many more, including Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus (2009) and 2-Headed Shark Attack (2012). Both of these films spawned a run of sequels, with Mega Shark being pitted against Crocosaurus, Mechashark, and Kolossus, while the success of the 2-Headed Shark prompted further attacks by 3-Headed, 5-Headed and 6-Headed varieties (not sure why they skipped four, but the Wiki page might not be entirely trustworthy).

Some of the mockbusters also appear to have taken a very different approach to their source material. The film Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes released in the same year as the Robert Downey Jr. version, but when I took a look at the cover, it showed a giant T-rex, a kraken and a fire-breathing pterodactyl wreaking havoc in Victorian London, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t in the original. However, the strangest film that I found on the list was simply titled “The 9/11 Commission Report”. I was very nervous to read the Wikipedia article on this, but it seems that the film was too unknown to cause much controversy.

Are these films bad enough to be good?

This is the key question. While some films from The Asylum have become cult classics, most are quickly forgotten. I only ended up watching Jurassic Domination because my friend had been searching for the worst dinosaur movies in existence. It certainly lived up to these search criteria – not only because of its dinosaur inaccuracies, but because everything else was bad, too. It had no redeeming features. There were many sections which were laughably terrible, but these were too few and far between to sustain a consistent level of enjoyment. The rest was just incredibly boring.

Jurassic Domination contains mistakes that even the worst blockbusters would never permit. For example, within the first five minutes, we witness a conversation between two soldiers standing in front of a truck, and the camera angles leap around so erratically that it is impossible to work out where anyone is positioned, or how they have moved. When one of them ends up getting pounced by a dinosaur, we are left in genuine confusion as to where it came from, and why the other character didn’t see it – and this sort of camerawork persists throughout the film. It’s maddening.

It is also painfully apparent that the film only had the budget for a handful of dinosaur animations, and that these were handled by different studios (with “studio” being a generous term here). For half the film, I thought there were TWO big dinosaurs, only to discover that this was meant to be ONE big dinosaur. It turned out that they had used two different models in its animations, which were different colours and sizes, and with only one of them wearing a muzzle. The second problem with the animations was that the film kept cutting to the same two-second shot over and over again, which was almost funny – but not quite. However, I did laugh later in the film when they took one animation and played it twice, flipping it on the y-axis to make it look like a dinosaur was being shot from both sides. Ingenuity like this is the backbone of Asylum films. They are shamelessly shoddy.

In summary…

The Asylum rules the roost when it comes to making mockbusters. Their films are renowned for being awful, and rightfully so – but only some of them are bad enough to be good. The rest are just painfully bad. It takes a certain mindset to harvest any sort of enjoyment from them, and they can only truly be enjoyed in the company of friends, where you can share the pain and suffering. Jurassic Domination was not worth watching, and it will not be joining Sharknado in the hall of infamy any time soon. However, it did lead me down the Wikipedia wormhole into the strange world of The Asylum – and I hope you found this investigation as entertaining as I did.