Hell Asylum (2001)

... aka: Prison of the Dead 2

Directed by:
Danny Draven

Originally planned as a sequel to PRISON OF THE DEAD (a completely worthless film from David DeCoteau released the year prior), this videotaped Full Moon release is an uneven, but OK view. Five young ladies; Paige (Debra Mayer), Amber (Tanya Dempsey), Rainbow (Sunny Lombardo), Stacey (Stacey Scowley) and Marti (Olimpia Fernandez) are selected to take part in a reality TV series ("Chill Challenge") where spending the night locked away in an abandoned asylum could win them a million dollar prize. The place has been equipped with cameras and booby traps to try to scare them off, but murderous ghosts of former inmates eventually show up and do a much better job of it. Parts are atmospheric and reasonably well done given the extremely low budget, but the film is neither original nor interesting enough to entirely overcome its low budget limitations. And the special effects are pretty poor. Why the hell do the intestines look like cooked spaghetti noodles?! Brinke Stevens plays the "head spectre" here, but you will have a next-to-impossible task trying to locate her here. She is in minimal ghost make-up and wears a shrouded costume that obscures her face, but I think I spotted her maybe twice on close-up shots.

Joe Estevez pops up briefly in a pre-credits sequence as a TV investor and the cast also includes plenty of people who will be well-covered on this web-site by the time I finish expanding my index, including Timothy Muskatell (star of THE GHOULS), Paul Darrigo (co-star of WITCHOUSE 3: DEMON FIRE), Devin Hamilton (director of BLEED, BIRTH RITE and DELTA DELTA DIE!), Trent Haaga (who also scripted and served as line producer), Tammi Sutton (director of KILLJOY 2, also the producer) and Jason Paul Collum (director of the documentary SOMETHING TO SCREAM ABOUT and some other films with Scream Queen Stevens). It barely runs over an hour and you'll forget everything about it within 24 hours of watching it. Charles Band was the executive producer and it was originally released through his company Full Moon. It's also available on DVD from Tempe.

★★

Rockville Slayer, The (2003)

... aka: Hidden Fears
... aka: Unaware

Directed by:
Marc Selz

With this low budget film, you know you're in trouble right from the beginning. It's your typical slasher movie set-up featuring two football players and two cheerleaders getting killed, but what makes this grueling to sit through isn't the amateurish acting (which I expected anyway), but the absolutely pathetic dialogue the characters are given. The guys communicate via walkie talkies from separate cars as they prepare to get laid, using (ugh) football lingo ("I'm at the ten yard line!" ... "I'm going for a touchdown.") The filmmakers could have at least given us a cheap jump scare or a bloody murder as compensation. Nope! Just a quartet of off-screen kills that are tame, boring and poorly staged.

Despite the dull opening sequence and despite the fact this film was packaged and re-titled (it was originally called Unaware) to be a slasher film, it's anything but. I'm even hard pressed to even call this a horror film because it's seriously lacking in anything horrific. What it really is is an old-fashioned mystery-thriller with geeky small town deputy Charlie (Circus-Szalewski) teaming up with attractive female detective Amy (Nicole Buehrer) to investigate the aforementioned crimes. What's eventually uncovered is a secret from Charlie's own childhood that turns out to be the key to solving the mystery. Not that you'll really be all that interested in the mystery elements of this film because the whole thing is just so monotonous, derivative and uninteresting.

The highly variable acting and unimaginative direction don't help but the screenplay is what really does this film in. There is literally no original idea to be had in this entire film. Everything is a painfully worn out cliché, from the character interactions to the flashbacks to plot twists we've all seen used many times before. The explanation behind the slaying of the four teens at the beginning is downright absurd at best. Silly red herrings (including your token mental home escapee) are synthetically injected into the film to try to throw you off, but they really don't do much other than kill time. The three guest stars in the cast; Joe Estevez as a sheriff, Linnea Quigley as a batty harlot and a campy Robert Z'Dar as her sadistic partner, all do their jobs in an entertaining way.

Some people mentioned the music drove them up the wall, but it really didn't bother me much. What *did* bother me a lot was the sound quality on the DVD. I constantly had to fumble with the remote turning the volume up or down throughout the entire film. I'm not sure if this is incompetence on the filmmakers part or just a poorly and cheaply distributed DVD. The picture quality is surprisingly good for a film of this budget range and DP Joseph Farris deserves a shout out for a job very well done.

★1/2

Zero Boys, The (1986)

Directed by:

Nico Mastorakis

Title refers to a team of three male survivalists (Daniel Hirsch, Tom Shell and Jared Moses) who win a war games competition and celebrate the victory by vacationing at a secluded country home with their girlfriends (Nicole Rio and Crystal Carson), as well as Kelli Maroney, who their team also "won" from the rivals. Their fun is disrupted when they find snuff videos, a head in the freezer, a torture chamber in the barn and that several killers (including Joe Estevez in an early role while he was still using the name "Joe Phelan") are lurking around the premises with crossbows, knives and machetes. All the horror clichés are accounted for including a car that won't start, a sudden rainstorm, lots of false alarms, heavy breathing POV killer shots, booby trapped woods, people wandering off by themselves even after finding dead bodies, etc. If there are any missing, it's not from lack of trying.

Pretty routine stuff, but some now well-known people got their starts here, including production co-ordinator Marianne Maddalena (who worked on many of the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies) and assistant art director Frank Darabont (Oscar-nominated writer / director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile). Some of the music is by future Oscar winning composer Hans Zimmer (The Lion King).

★★