Hell Asylum (2002)

Posted on May 29, 2002 under Horror |

Directed by Danny Draven
Written by Trent Haaga
Starring
- Debra Mayer
- Tanya Dempsey
- Sunny Lombardo
- Stacey Scowley
- Olimpia Fernandez
- Tim Muskatell
Produced by Tammi Sutton
Executive produced by J.R. Bookwalter and Charles Band

I like Danny Draven. He’s the Boy Wonder behind HorrorVision (if you’re younger than me, you’re a kid, dammit!), and he’s probably the best director in the current Tempe/Full Moon stable for wringing creativity and visual flair out of a budget which would bring most directors to tears. (Which means that his stated intention to stop working for Full Moon and seek out more lucrative pastures is both saddening and exciting.)

Hell Asylum is most interesting to a viewer who knows the history of Full Moon’s declining fortunes and increasingly truncated budgetary resources; if you know the background, then even without the “director’s diary” or commentary track on the limited edition DVD, you can clearly perceive the tension between creative impulse and the scant $35,000 available for production.

Thank you, Mr. President.

TV producer Max (Tim Muskatell) has only enough waning pull with the network for one last pitch: “Chill Challenge,” a Reality TV concept that locks five people inside a haunted house for the night, with various challenges issued to them based on their personal phobias, competing for a million-dollar prize. The real kicker? All five contestants are hot babes! With much wheedling, he manages to convince studio exec Stan (Joe Estevez!) to greenlight the pilot, with the understanding that they don’t actually have a million dollars to throw at this.

It’s perfect premise for a low-budget movie, given that Reality TV is so popular with the networks precisely because of the lower production costs. (Hey, at least it’s not another Blair Witch ripoff. Exactly.) And if there seems to be a knowing subtext on the part of the filmmakers about Full Moon’s own declining pull and need to appeal to the lowest common denominator… Well, I’m not saying that it’s there one way or the other, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

The infamously haunted Mason House is rigged with a hundred hidden cameras. The techs doing it hold the entire idea in great derision — but the sudden presence of a hooded spectre who disembowels one (Trent Haaga, the screenwriter, and also recently seen in Terror Firmer) and disembowels the other gives is the clue that the night’s events may not go entirely according to schedule.

It’s here that you’re going to see some great evidence of Draven’s creativity on a meager budget. The scene is shot almost entirely from the perspective of the hidden camera that the two techs are installing, punctuated by bursts of interference and other recording permutations which both breaks up the static shot and also partially obscures the killings, giving them a more mysterious quality.

Let the bickering commence!

However, I’m going to have to guess that the spook cleans up after itself pretty well, because no evidence of two messy murders prevents the big day when the five contestants enter the premises. We’re introduced to each as they step through the door via pre-recorded interview footage giving their name and any particular phobias, as well as a basic feel for their characters. Each is shot in an interesting two-camera fashion, with the interviewer questions being completely inaudible. And each of them seems a little long — an impression which is definite by the time all five of them have stepped through the doors. Why? Talk is cheap, baby! We’ve got to fill this thing out to minimum feature length, and that means dialogue, dialogue, dialogue!

Just to make things easy for you, here’s a quick timesaving rundown of our contestants:

Character	Actress	Character Type	Fear
Stacy	Stacey Scowley	Ditz	Just about anything
Rainbow	Sunny Lombardo	New Age/Goth	Pain — not death, just continuing pain
Amber	Tanya Dempsey	???	“Creepy crawly things”
Marti	Olimpia Fernandez	“Black”	Claustrophobia
Paige Turner (ha, ha, ha)	Debra Mayer	Bitch	Suburban obscurity

This summary is actually overly simplistic, as (to Trent Haaga’s credit) the girls aren’t all one-note stereotypes. Stacy isn’t a typical ditz (though she is blonde), but more of a girl-next-door innocent. Rainbow (hippie parents, naturally) combines both the rebelliousness of a Goth with the spiritual sensitivity of a New Ager. Amber comes across as a fairly level-headed girl without a “Hi, I’m A _____” placard around her neck. Marti is black, but not in the sense of schtick; rather, she exhibits the self-reliance and strength of a modern sistah. And Paige (aside from that godawful name) isn’t just bitchy for the hell of it; she’s in this contest for the fame and fortune, and sees no profit in getting all girl-friendly with her competitors.

Anyway. Max gives them the spiel about the house in the foyer, that sadistic nineteenth century tycoon Phineas Mason ahd built it and then “bought” several successive mail-order brides over the next ten years, none of whom were ever seen after they passed through the doors until the day law enforcement finally burst in and found their corpses in the basement, dead after having been imprisoned and tortured. In the grand tradition of Full Moon pictures in which the building was originally something other than what it very obviously is today (see Prison of the Dead and The Vault), The building then became a sanitarium (one is forced to assume that it was renovated at that time to give it institutional hallways wider than anything you’d ever see in a residence), but was closed once it became apparent that the building was having a deleterious effect on the condition of its residents. The legend is that the wives of Phineas Mason still haunt the premises… Woo-oooh…

A photo shoot for the Sears Catalog goes horribly, horribly wrong.

And I sure hope you like setup and introductory materials, because we’ve been watching this movie for twenty minutes already, and we’ve still got a few more to go before the plot proper actually kicks in. Max explains some further rules: That the contestants will stay in the large “safe room” (which, gotta say, is decorated with some kick-ass “primitive art” murals) until called out, at which time they take a flashlight a headset with a mike to the control room and a “contestant cam” on the side, and accomplish the test set out… or press the red “escape button” on the side, forfeit, and be escorted out.

And without further ado… Whoops, wait, the girls are called upon to cool their heels for a half hour together until sundown, just so we can get our pointless bickering quotient in. (To be fair, there’s a lot less uninspired sniping in this movie than in plenty of other recent Full Moon releases.) This also gives an opportunity for Rainbow, who’s naturally up on this whole Mason House legend, to provide some variant detail: Some say that Mason’s wives hadn’t just been tortured, they’d been “experimented on” — Mason trying to piece together parts of each wife until he’d built a perfect woman. (And no, the portrait of Phineas Mason hanging in the hall bears no resemblance to Jeffrey Combs.)

Once the contest starts, the first one called out is Marti, who, with a stated fear of tight spaces, is the easiest mark. Her journey through the house is documented on the black’n'white “contestant cam,” which is about the only real visual nod to The Blair Witch Project, godfather (godmother?) to all recent faux-reality features. Her task is simply to find the library, enter a closet, and pull an object from a hole in the wall… but the door’s rigged to lock behind her, and she panicks so completely that she never checks the hole in the wall to find out that the object was in fact the key. Humiliated and angry, she’s disqualified, and shows herself to the door.

Or almost does — because she’s met by a black-cowled figure, and suddenly there’s a pile of gore and viscera on the floor that used to be lodged in her torso.

Let the killings begin.

Boogah boogah boogah!

One thing I found refreshing about this movie was the unabashed amount of gore. Not that I’m a bloodfreak, but there’s a difference between subtlety and the downright squeamishness exihibited by many of the recent Full Moon flicks which have tried to be “inoffensive horror” (most of them under the hand of David deCoteau, who’s now doing much the same thing under his own production company, Rapid Heart Pictures). A horror picture that steadfastly refuses to even attempt to horrify is pretty much a waste. So it’s gratifying to see Draven & Co. let their gore be limited by budget instead of the impulse to provide a “kinder, gentler” breed of horror. (Although can someone please explain to me why guts in this movie always look like some kind of stringy pasta?)

There are also several notably welldone scenes scattered through. In one, poor Rainbow is knocked down the stairs, breaking both legs and her back in the process. She lies at the bottom, in breathtaking pain (remember, what was her secret fear?), and begs the other contestants and the occasional spook to please please kill her — and none do.

In another, Amber gets showered with grubs and maggots, and screams here way to a begrimed bathroom, where she strips to her me-oh-mys and showers the bugs out of her hair. The gritty filthiness of the plumbing, combined with the mealworms squirming in the drain, would probably have a true entomophobic viewer retching.

In fact, all the way through, Danny Draven demonstrates that he really needs to be cut loose with a bigger budget. The director’s diary on the limited edition DVD (making up for the lack of Videozones these days) shows Draven making an entry after each day’s shooting, and the refrain becomes depressing: That due to the time constraints of an eight-day shoot, he’s had to jettison a lot of the cool camera work he’d planned and instead settle for simple master shots and stationary work. Yet even with those constraints, he’s proved to be able to tell the story effectively (and this, you recall, on a budget roughly a third of what is was on HorrorVision). I’d give my eyeteeth to see how a feature turns out when the movie in his head makes it to the editing room.

But, as with most of the recent crop of Full Moon flicks, I’ve got almost a standardized list of complaints. As noted, the setup takes over twenty minutes, much of it filler. The feature as a whole lasts about 65 minutes (70, counting the entire closing credits), and even then it seems to be a stretch to fill that much time with the material provided. (When in doubt, add some dialogue!)

And the ultimate goal of the Mason wives mythology seems underdeveloped. For the longest time it seems like there’s only one shrouded figure, and even when more appear I don’t remember ever seeing more than two at a time. A single scene, even a single shot, showing the entire rollcall of wives, could have filled out so much. And their mission, to kill and gnaw the viscerals of all the living in the house, doesn’t have much of a point aside from from “I’m a spook, that’s what I do.” I mean, they don’t seem to have a particular vendetta against men or women, or a real mission of vengeance.

“So, do you like my NADS?”

Particularly wasted is Brinke Stevens as the one spectre whose face we see. Unfortunately, her thick makeup includes a brow appliance which not only makes her look completely unlike herself (what’s the point of a guest star whose presence isn’t realized until the closing credits?), but also not at all like a female. Color me confused at that point.

I don’t usually second-guess movies once they’re made, but here’s what I think would have been a much better ending, and no more budget-intensive than what was actually shot (Danny and Trent, feel free to kick yourselves for not thinking of this): Instead of having an indeterminate number of cowled figures, have only one (which is what it seemed like most of the time), whose face is ultimately revealed to be a Frankensteinian patchwork of all of the Mason wives, made as one. Then she/they could be killing the men out of a completely understandable case of man-hatred, and the women because they don’t need the competition: “We are complete — we are perfect!”

Which just goes to show that the movie in your head is often better than the one on screen. And I don’t think Danny would have any argument with that statement in this case.