That Snickering Skinface: Doom Asylum (1987)

Doom Asylum (1987)
Rating: **1/2
Starring:  Patty Mullen, Ruth Collins, Kristin Davis

I once asked myself if I am the kind of guy who can enjoy almost anything life can throw at him. For all honestly, I am not, so is it that surprising that I have mixed feelings for this supposed slasher comedy?

Doom Asylum (1987) features, much to insult my intelligence, the dumbest cards to play every slasher stereotype there is, the killer included. The story follows a group of five teens venturing to an accident site to pay respect for a man named Mitch, who crashed and lost his wife in a drive gone wrong, though this sentiment is quickly tossed off the window when these kids decide to go sunbathing and picnicking instead inside a nearby abandoned asylum.

Same asylum where Mitch, horribly deformed from what should have been his autopsy, murdered the morticians and, apparently, the rest of the staff. Don't know how, don't care. It's now very barren, let's leave it at that.

Or maybe not too barren; other than our killer, also in the asylum is an all-girl punk band secretly rehearsing their wailing singing which our group of brightly-colored idiots stumble upon. The token black guy then gets suddenly smitten by the band's token black girl and soon this guy just has to go in and meet up with her, only to be killed with a pair of clamps.

Right after that, ole' skinned Mitch begins to systematically kill off those who enter his asylum from both parties, doing it all in good blood which I'm happy for but, wow, the whole deal is just odd. Like, concerningly corny odd.

To be fair, the Doom Asylum was intentionally made as a slasher-comedy so I guess it is to be expected that our characters are supposed to be dumb enough to give us some chuckles. Sadly, as far as half-baked horror comedy goes, this only half-worked as the silly approach just made the casts increasingly annoying and obnoxious, overcooking the cliches they're supposed to be spoofing. They're basically just cartoon characters played by live actors with really bad scripting and wooden acting, with the worst being our killer who, in every murder, just has to spit out something supposedly witty, but fails when you realize one-liners are supposed to be one sentences, not an entire paragraph. (He just had to explain to us his political views...)

There isn't much of a story to tell here either, just some cliched jokes and by-the-book bodycount movie theatrics. Thankfully, it's the blood and gore that made Doom Asylum worth a single night's renting, as every character here meet their demise as gorily as possible, making some of the waiting and enduring worthwhile. (Including a death by bonesaw of pre-Sex and the City Kristin Davis, which is a pure winner for me since she played the most annoying skeptic I've seen here. That and I just really hate that series...)

Running on a short 77 minutes and (any longer than that and I might have thrown the TV off a window) and filled in with lengthy black and white footages from the movie The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), Doom Asylum has its ups and downs, but if one's willing to relax and feel smarter than everybody else then look no further! It may fail to be completely funny, but it does make up for it with good kills like some dork getting a powerdrill to his head just because he kept chasing a baseball card...

Bodycount:
1 female killed in car crash
1 male stabbed on the chest with scalpel
1 male stabbed to death with scalpel
1 male had his head crushed with clamps
1 female dunked head-first into an acid-filled sink
1 male powerdrilled on the head
1 female strangled with stethoscope
1 female gets a bonesaw to the face
1 male gets a hypodermic needle to the neck, toes cut off
1 female crushed to a cube through meat processor
1 male repeatedly stabbed on the eye with a mirror's handle
Total: 11