Customer Reviews

Asylum of Terror

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I was lucky to have rented the tape of this movie, rather than having bought it. This is an indie production shot on 16mm film stock as I have been informed in the comments section (I originally thought it was shot on video, but that was my mistake).

The picture and sound quality both suffer; this is a result of the production and does not refer to the DVD. I will handle different aspects of the movie seperately. Since it has been a while since I have seen this movie, I do not recall the names of the actors and characters (and even if I saw it again today, I doubt I would still recall their names).

The Plot: A group of teens? (young adults?) are putting on a haunted house show at an abandoned prison (for the criminally insane?) which is reputed to be haunted, according to what they tell their customers. The prison was shut down as the result of a fire. They call their show the Asylum Of Terror (evil laugh included). The inmate responsible for the fire has escaped from somewhere else and begins a killing spree back at his old haunt. Yep, that about covers the plot.

Production: though it appears as though the movie was done on video, if this was shot on 16mm film stock, it was either done poorly, a bad transfer, or a combination of both. The camera work varies between good, acceptable and poor. There are a few scenes where it would have benefitted the cameraman to turn off the autofocus. One in particular involves a couple in a car where when one is in focus the other is completely out of focus. The sound suffers much the same where someone more distant from the camera would be that much weaker in volume, especially the actor playing the killer; several times you can barely hear what he is saying. The positive side of the production is the editing; they did a good job with what they had available. There is a scene where the killer sees his dead cellmate and the cellmate is laughing and the shot transitions between the cellmates normal face and a skull face several times. The transitions are well done and the sound is consistent throuhout the transitions. The actor playing the cellmate and the team responsible for the shoot deserve credit.

Acting: There are 3 good performances in this movie. I have already mentioned the actor playing the killer's cellmate. The actor who is the main player of this movie does a good job, particularly in a scene where he in showing one of the crew how to ham it up for the customers. There is also an attractive blond woman who unfortunately gets chainsawed, however, she really makes that scene happen. Most of the other acting(?) is no more than line reading.

Overall this movie is not very entertaining unless you just have to see every slasher flick that comes out. The bad acting of most of the players is humorous at times. The plot is obvious at the beginning and it adds nothing when it is discovered that the killer was the one responsible for the fire. Aside from the good points I have mentioned, I found myself just waiting for the movie to end. I gave the movie two stars for the aspects which I have mentioned. They do deserve credit for putting this together and getting it distibuted. There are quite a few film-maker hopefuls who do not make it this far.-Bob

I'm sure you all think you've seen the worst horror movie ever ... from the "gore gore girls" to such classics as "evil dead". But the combination of common halloween props... to a murderer wearing a black and gray windbreaker... to the wonderful camp value of the cut away shot to blood hitting the wall, on almost every single murder..., well you catch my drift. I think this film was shot in a high school gymnasium.. either that or alot of asylums have basketball hoops. Yet the fact still remains... if movies are supposed to be an escape, and fun.. this movie gets 5 flickering light bulbs! You can't keep a bad film down! All hail asylum of terror!

I give this movie a 1 only because it started out good.In the end, the movie lost my attention completely. It was about an old prison opening up as a haunted house. A bunch of people were watiing outside to enter. (the sound in this movie was like distint and horrible.) The people weren't really good at acting it seemed like, that was a bad part. The haunted house turned out to be really stupid, i think. There was a killer roaming around the haunted house first dressed as Jason Voorhees, than as Michael Myers. It was such a copy of Friday the 13th and Halloween. After that happened, the movie just got lamer and lamer. I really don't reccommend it.

Asylum of Terror (George Demick, 1998)

I have watched a lot of bad movies this week. And I have watched very little but bad movies this week. (The highest rating I've given so far this week is three stars, and that for a short I'm not planning on reviewing.) And while it's only Tuesday, I feel pretty safe in saying that the worst movie I'm going to see this week is Asylum of Terror, because if I see anything worse this week, I may end up faced with such a crisis of existential dread as to feed myself into the nearest woodchipper. Seeing two movies this bad in one week should be against the law.

The plot is an old, old, old one: haunted house, kids dying, blah blah blah. The twist here is that it's a Halloween haunted house (you know, the kind to which you pay admission) as opposed to a classic haunted house. If you're thinking "hey, I've seen that twist before!", you're absolutely right. Many times, in fact, though I can't off the top of my head think of another movie using the twist that came out before 1998, so maybe I have to damn this thing with enough faint praise to say it unleashed such knockoffs as Hallow's End. That's something to be proud of, all right.

It should surprise you far less that half this cast never worked in film again than it does that half the cast did. The whole batch of them are awful. The sound is frighteningly bad, though to be fair it's a hair better than the sound in Birdemic (the other film from this week that might have contended for "worst thing I watched"). The special effects are... not special. At all. And what there is is overused (yes, we cut to the wall every time someone gets killed, and Demick's fake blood is even cheesier than Brian Paulin's. I seriously think the guy was just using tomato sauce).

Asphyxiation is more fun than watching Asylum of Terror. And not of the autoerotic kind, either. May well find a place on my list of the hundred worst movies ever made. I'm giving it half a star because, for some masochistic reason, I actually watched the whole thing, and it's not outright offensive--just incompetent. ½

this is a wonderful piece of cinema. If you're the person (like me) who occasionally appreciates total crap. Asylum of Terror will take you're breath in the sense that it will make you think, 'oh my god, this is horribly amazing I cant turn away!' You just need to see it, I highly recommend it to any stoner, people with an un-orthodox sense of humor.

Well, I worked as Asst. Lighting on this and was dissapointed with it when I first saw the film. You know. It's your first time getting to work on anything beyond you or your friend's videos/films and you are hopeing this will be the 90's "Night of the Living Dead." That was 10 years ago and I've mellowed towards it over the time. If you are throwing a Halloween Party this movie is perfect to throw on and just have playing in the background, sound off. The major dissapointment here is that the actual location was extremely scary. When we would move locations and shoot in another part of the building, all lights went with them and people got sent by themselves with a flashlight to go pick up anything that was left. Trust me going around in that place alone like that was scary!!! None of this is present in the film however and the movie is really bad in all areas. The biggest thing making the film difficult to even sit through is the horrible audio. I would really like to know if [..]the original audio tapes and if there is someway that the sound could be improved. The other thing making the film beyond your normal bad is that many of the shots are out of focus because of the crap lens this ancient 16mm camera had. On a new and ahead of its time note, this movie has an annoying kid get killed and a male be the lead survivor, not just have him be the surviving girl's boyfriend. [..]

This is a very low-budget movie about a haunted house attraction that opens up in (surprise) an old prison for the criminally insane. Predictably, an escaped maniac from said prison returns to the haunted house to kill everybody.

The first 15 minutes or so are all build-up. You see several different groups of people on their way to the haunted house talking about how scary and great it's going to be. My favorite is a mother with two young boys who says twice, very unconvincingly, "I don't know, boys. I don't like this idea". Then she cheers as each of them gets a souvenir picture in the old electric chair (who doesn't want a picture of their kid in an electric chair?)

Just when you wonder if ANYBODY is ever going to actually get inside the place, the action begins. You see some of the customers, as well as the workers, making their way through the haunted prison. One of the customers is a blind woman. When someone asks her, fairly enough, what she gets out of coming to haunted houses, she says she likes the sounds, such as glass breaking (!)

Then the killer appears. He dons several different masks as he makes his way through the prison, slaughtering everybody. I must say, some of the killings were quite imaginative- someone getting drilled to death with a cordless drill, a girl being run through with a chainsaw, a man being set afire.

There is quite a bit of sex and nudity (all female); in between getting killed, these people find a lot of time to screw around with one another.
The acting is beyond awful- only Jason Petty, the star of the film, puts in a decent performance as the director/manager of the haunted house. The sound quality is terrible- you can't even hear many of the conversations, not that it matters, probably. So why did I give it 3 stars? Because it was so silly it was entertaining.

If you only love Horror flicks with big budgets, my bet is you won't like ASYLUM OF TERROR. But if you love cheap bloody slashers like I do, I can not recommend you enough to add that flick to your collection while it's still time.
It is, it's true, technicaly inept ( the acting, the editing, the lighting, the sound... most of it sucks )but believe me, that flick is nothing but fun. The body count is high, the murders are nice ( especially the chainsaw scene ) and the general mood is dark, bloody and dusty. Hell... even a child gets killed. In the end, the cheapness of it all makes it even more enjoyable.
I give stars to ASYLUM OF TERROR for what it is : a no budget real honest slasher flick for slasher fans.

Let me get right to the point,this movie is got to be worst movie ever made.Nothing about the movie is good nothing.Please belive me when i say, don't waste your time watching this nastyness.I give it 0 stars.This movie sux to the fullest

I worked at the prison in this movie in 1996. I would love to see this movie but I haven't yet. Hopefully it is at a local Hollywood Video. This prison is really haunted. I experienced a ghost while I was working as an actor at, as it was called at the time, Death Row: The Haunted Prison. I am still loooking up information on the history of this prison but have only found out that it is the former Prison for the Criminally Insane and from hearing various stories from former guards of the prison who worked with the actors. The prison was torn down in early 2000s.