Nightmare Asylum (1992)

 

Director: Todd Sheets

Screenplay: Todd Sheets

Cast: Lori Hassel as Lisa; Matthew Lewis as Spider; J.T. Taube as Jimiah; Mike Hellman as David; Jenny Admire as Melissa; Charles Gooseman as Pops; Jerry Angell as Sonny Boy; Deric Bernier as Shlooby

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #260 / An Abstract Candidate

 

My aching banana!

I have wanted to see Nightmare Asylum for a long time, knowing this would be completely unwatchable for most viewers. For context, Todd Sheets from 1985 onwards has been a prolific micro-budget filmmaker who, baring an absence of 2005 to 2013, has been working into the 2010s onwards. He himself has negated anything before Zombie Rampage (1992) as actually being films, those before an embarrassment for him, so this era does come with mind of his own opinions of it¹.

Yet, the likes of Nightmare Asylum exists, with David DeCoteau of Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988) as its executive producer no less, a film shot entirely in a haunted house, as we begin with a woman named Lisa (Lori Hassel) running in corridors from a masked man. This improvised location is suggests to be an openly surreal nightmare realm, as she encounters a man with his legs trapped in a giant mousetrap, eating raw meat until he is chain sawed, the film improvising its location's existing props. The other immediate aspect is that the sound design is terrible, some of the worse technically you can encounter and what you have to deal with even before the content for the entire hour long film. Dialogue is barely audible; the music is in one channel which significantly louder. The music is constant throughout, be it an attempt at a Goblin score, openly borrowing part of the Fabio Frizzi soundtrack of The Beyond (1981), and a lot of Gustav Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War, the most famous part of his composed the Planets Suite. You will hear Mars, Bringer of War many times, even over a man getting a pike up the rectum, making this at least a perverse audio experience to hear even if most will find this unbearable, let alone digest the actual content of Nightmare Asylum. Certainly, Holst would have not expected this when he composed the Planets Suite.

The plot is also vague and really non-existent, more a series of incidents and gore scenes where the haunted house realm is full of weirdoes, such as the family of Spider (Matthew Lewis), a young man who rescues Lisa from that masked figure and introduces her to his home, lived in by men who are savaging for any food, even severed human feet. On the other side and more dangerous is a group of psychopaths led by Todd Sheets. Sheets is recognisable as a more bulkier David Mustaine, the lead musician of Megadeth, with a giant mane of blonde hair. He shouts a lot, sings a bit of the song from Herschell Gordon Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), part of the film's clear genesis from a horror fan, and sometimes talk about his aching fruits and kumquats. His group, as Lisa is pulled around a lot as an innocent bystander to this world, will maim people for the hell of it.

It is an excuse for many low, low budget splatter scenes - nails forced into mouths mimed, a tongue being cut without seeing it clearly - which was a staple of his work at the time like Goblin (1993), but is toned down in places when other films had a heavy emphasis on real organ meat being fondled. To a viewer who may roll their eyes at all this, I can say Todd Sheets worked and worked until he could make a film like Clownado (2018), which is not as ironic as that title suggests but is a solidly made micro-budget film in comparison to this. He would improve into a competent low budget horror filmmaker with a taste for quirks, taking his splatter film mentality onwards and, with a film like Clownado, making a film aware of its limitations but able to be more interesting than films thrice its budget. It is the case, whilst many are harder to find nowadays, his earlier work like Nightmare Asylum did get proper releases, and were always going to be a yard stick to work from when this is clearly of an entire spectrum of filmmaking with its own acquired taste.

Instead, I come to this entirely as an amateur production which has a likable energy in spite of its hellish technical issues, where even the haunted house itself is the work of nerdy horror fans, such as fake gravestones for Stephen King, John Carpenter and Wes Craven in one scene when someone is dragged into graves. There is, if you can partake or absorb this, the chaos of something delightfully gaudy even if I am one of the few people willing to partake in this. It has the mentality where no one bothers to hide the haunted house's "Exit" signs, instead referenced as a one way direction to a worse form of Hell to avoid. The haunted house itself is a thing of lurid beauty, a public environment one could only hope to enter with its elaborate rooms, such as a morgue, alongside props like bloodied mannequins and even a replica of Linda Blair as the possessed version of her character from The Exorcist (1973) which is cut to multiple times. All shot in green and purple darkened lighting, with fog Lucio Fulci would be proud of, the location shines even if the production is haphazard and feels semi if greatly improvised. In fact, imaging this is the equivalent of a live theatrical performance with splatter, transpiring inside a haunted house, is probably the best way to digest the film, even in terms of the home recording of it being far from perfect. Even in terms of a film made within this world that, frankly, is one of the biggest messes I could come across, I was immersed and entertained by access like this.

It is the best and the worse of micro-budget filmmaking, the participatory nature of the film a good thing, even if suffering from barely audible dialogue and music, where there is a knowing absurdity even in the lack of gore in this particular film, improvising with spaghetti seemingly used at one point as improvised human insides. This is a film on a different hand too however where someone did, to their credit, figured out facial bladder effects, even if for someone randomly becoming a she-demon, showing this sense of people trying even if failing. That sense of it being barely stuck together is its greatest flaw but at the same time, it compels me. There is a least of sense of trying and unpredictability even if this was a futile project from the get-go, never boring at least. It is only an hour, and even the twist ending, that this was all a dream only to try to trick the audience, gave a sense of being erratic and trying to get the viewer pulled in. It is to be approached with caution, but I was glad to have seen this.

Abstract Spectrum: Erratic/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) I have probably referred from this interview, from the podcast No-Budget Nightmare, before, but it perfectly sums up Todd Sheets' own views of his earliest work as bluntly as possible.