Doom Asylum (1987)

 

Director: Richard Friedman

Screenplay: Rick Marx

Cast: Patty Mullen as Judy LaRue / Kiki LaRue; Ruth Collins as Tina; Kristin Davis as Jane; William Hay as Mike; Kenny L. Price as Dennis; Harrison White as Darnell; Dawn Alvan as Godiva; Farin as Rapunzel; Michael Rogen as Mitch Hansen

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It's Wade Boggs, he's blown away!

Doom Asylum is one of the more obscure slasher films in existence, and I will preference the following that even very well regarded films in the sub-genre like the Friday the 13th sequels are ridiculous, something as much part of the charm for their fans and where Doom Asylum is as silly as these films can get.

It is full of the clichés and there is a sense, whilst clearly sold on slasher film tropes and the gore, this is aware of being stuck in the later era of this genre as they were declining, with a deliberately comedic tone. There is however also the sense that, when you even have the cliché of the morgue attendant who immediately bites into a sandwich before working on a corpse, a lot of filmmakers were oblivious of repeating these tropes and inexplicably they started being the kind of ideas everyone jumps to when fleshing out filmed sequences. The set up is simple - an attorney is involved in a car crash with his girlfriend, waking up on the morgue slab with his face cut off and having also lost his mind. With his hand girlfriend, the surviving piece of his love, he stays inside an abandoned mental asylum watching old British films starring Tod Slaughter, a British actor who was prolific playing villains during the thirties in British gothic melodramas, whilst maiming anyone who wanders nearby.

This, as slasher films goes, barely hides the pretence of the gore, full of the goofiest main leads as you have a nerdy guy whose only character interest is a pathological interest in baseball cards, a daughter of two psychologists who as the nerdy female character crowbars in psychological insights which are flimsy, and the most psychologically questionable male and female lead, as due to her issues, she eventually starts to call her boyfriend her "mother" out of comfort, which eventually gets as weird sexually as that sounds. Naturally you find yourself more closer to Tina & The Tots, the trio of punk women playing avant-garde drone in the asylum - far more appealing with their leather, fishnets with holes in them, chains and spikes, you have Ruth Collins as Tina cackling and pronouncing her lines as broadly as you can get, and one of the members even being a stereotypical liberal feminist with a faux French accent talking about the patriarchy and overcoming capitalism.  

We are fully in a giant cinema piece of cheese here, with "Spike head" a credible insult and our lead killer fully from the school that, since the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels were doing well, he should make jokes as he kills people. The gore is so strong from special effects artist Vincent J. Guastini, in drastic contrast to the goofy tone, that you can feel cynical that this was just a death spectacle delivery machine, if not for one of the last being the reveal that the asylum has a body processor which turns people into cubes of meat. Then you see this had a sense of humour even if it does really skimp over conventions of setting anyone up as fleshed out.

The film is an acquired taste, let us be honest. The little touches more than the "narrative" is why we are here, with the cheesy lines spoken awkwardly the cherry on top. The Tod Slaughter film footage is really idiosyncratic to have chosen, just by bringing forth with a lot of films used, in having an obscure era of British gothic melodramas being evoked few may even talk about; Tod Slaughter really an early era example of a cult star who in films like Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street  (1936) was the villain who goes maniacal when the polite veneer is peeled off, even (if faked) having his crimes being accused of by a corpse of a victim of his in one of the many tantalising pieces of footage used. That in enough made Doom Asylum worthwhile. The asylum itself is a character for its ridiculous graffiti alone. "Dead Zeppelin!" is there, as is the unholy combination, to show punks and the unruly have taken the place over, of having both Pink Floyd and Metallica spray painted on the walls among other words. It does the heavy lifting for what is a string of deaths, slowly whittling through the cast as disposable figures, by making everything clearly a farce whether intentional or not.

It does raise the point whether Doom Asylum should be appreciated as entertainment when there is, honestly, laziness to this. I think personally the weird tone would salvage the film for me even if I was not a figure who feels no film should have its existence questioned; unless we are really going after a AAA blockbuster of nowadays to question, films like this from the straight-to-video era are more interesting in just that, when they succeed or are very weird, they are interesting even if material is really threadbare. Doom Asylum, a low budget production, is deeply silly, too silly to have any cynicism of. Far more criticism comes from just the stereotypes - if we are to get serious here, the two African-American characters are as broad as you can get, and with little to work with, the film just manages to stay the right side of gauche to not need to have to be taken to aside for dubious characterisation, all because neither has anything really to do and thus we can avoid even worse characterisation. The film itself is one of those that, if you like slashers or have a fascination for really peculiar genre movies from the past, will win you over. This is more of a case for me that, fun and deeply silly, Doom Asylum is acquired taste even for me if appreciated.

There is definitely a case of this being not quite in my usual wheelhouse. Patty Mullen, the lead, was in Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990) as the titular figure, and that is definitely my kind of bizarre and inventive genre film from this era. The touches we get here are strange and fascinating - referencing an obscure cult figure from Britain is one, having a version of House of the Rising Sun on the soundtrack being another - only that in the scheme of slashers, as someone who has an ambivalent view of them sometimes, it is legitimately out of preference that there are others I find more interesting. My mind wanders to the sincere silliness of The Mutilator (1984), a regional production its director and crew pushed from little, the outright cheese spectacle of Nail Gun Massacre (1985), or the downright tonally skewered Satan's Blade (1985). This is, well, the deeply goofy one which will be remembered for the female lead calling her boyfriend "Mom" and saying that it would be incest if they hooked up. It is a deeply curious film as a result, but with other films in this ballpark I would hold to higher esteem.