Welcome to The Asylum, where big-screen dreams are made fast, cheap and usually with something giant, hungry or legally interesting lurking nearby.
The new feature documentary Mockbuster follows Australian filmmaker Anthony Frith as he escapes corporate video work and lands a surprise job directing a lost-world dinosaur film for The Asylum, the notorious B-movie studio behind Sharknado, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies and Titanic II.
The catch? He has just six days, a shoestring budget, suburban Adelaide locations, demanding LA execs, a bewildered cast and his own creeping self-doubt to contend with. Naturally, Frith also turns the camera on himself, capturing the behind-the-scenes chaos as both productions push him to the brink.
Funny, eye-opening and unexpectedly poignant, Mockbuster is about chasing the dream through the absurd hustle of genre filmmaking, while a different kind of success begins to take shape behind the scenes.
To support the release of Mockbuster, we’re looking back at ten Asylum movies that show exactly why the studio became such a cult phenomenon. Some are direct riffs. Some are monster-mash madness. Some are legal headaches in DVD form. All of them could only have come from The Asylum.
Sharknado
The big one. The film that turned The Asylum from mockbuster merchants into a full-blown pop-culture punchline, then somehow into a genuine franchise. A freak weather system hits Los Angeles, sharks rain from the sky, Ian Ziering grabs a chainsaw and the internet does the rest. It is ridiculous, knowingly daft and absolutely central to the studio’s legacy. We can all agree that Jaws is the greatest shark movie of all time, and Sharknado is without a doubt the best worst shark movie of them all. The franchise took took Fin and co to space, through time, and featured David Hasselhoff. A prequel is currently in production.
Transmorphers
Released in the slipstream of Michael Bay’s Transformers, this was not The Asylum being subtle. Set 300 years after alien robots conquer Earth, it finds humanity emerging from underground for one last fight against its mechanical overlords. It became one of the studio’s biggest-selling DVD releases, proving that a familiar-sounding title, a giant robot and a sense of timing could go a very long way.
Snakes on a Train
Get this Mother Father snakes of this monkey farming train, that’s the iconic line right? One of The Asylum’s cheekiest early plays, swapping Samuel L. Jackson’s airborne reptile problem for a cursed train journey to Los Angeles. There are snakes, there is a train, there is a Mayan curse and there is absolutely no pretence that anyone misunderstood the assignment. It is a perfect example of the studio’s ability to take a title people already knew and swerve it just enough to make something beautifully stupid.
The Da Vinci Treasure
The Asylum did not only chase superheroes, sharks and giant robots. It also went after airport-thriller territory, with this treasure-hunt adventure landing in the wake of The Da Vinci Code. C. Thomas Howell stars as an anthropologist racing through clues, conspiracies and historical secrets, giving the studio its own bargain-bin spin on religious mystery, puzzle-box plotting and Tom Hanks-adjacent intrigue.
I Am Omega
Released into the same orbit as I Am Legend, this post-apocalyptic action-horror casts Mark Dacascos as a lone survivor battling infected hordes after civilisation collapses. It is lean, scrappy and far more action-driven than its blockbuster cousin, which is exactly the Asylum way. If Hollywood gives you prestige sci-fi loneliness, The Asylum gives you martial arts, mutants and a man with a lot of weapons.
Age of the Hobbits / Clash of the Empires/Lord of the Elves
One of The Asylum’s most infamous legal tangles, this fantasy adventure was originally released under the title Age of the Hobbits, before Warner Bros. took issue with its proximity to Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. A federal judge agreed, leading to a last-minute title change to Clash of the Empires (or Lord of the Elves in some countries). The film itself is pure Asylum sword-and-sandal chaos, with prehistoric creatures, jungle tribes and Christopher Judge (Stargate SG1) leading the charge. As mockbuster legends go, this one practically comes with its own court transcript.
Paranormal Entity
The Asylum’s answer to Paranormal Activity is exactly the kind of title that made rental shelves so dangerous. Presented as found footage, it follows a family plagued by supernatural disturbances, with cameras capturing the escalating horror. Cheap, nasty and efficient, it shows how quickly the studio could absorb a trend, rebuild it in its own image and get it in front of audiences while the original was still fresh in the culture.
Titanic II
A streaming cult favourite and one of The Asylum’s most gloriously brazen title grabs. Directed by Shane Van Dyke, grandson of screen legend Dick Van Dyke, Titanic II is set 100 years after the original disaster and follows a luxury liner launched to retrace the doomed ship’s route, because apparently nobody involved has ever heard of tempting fate. Naturally, history repeats itself with added budget chaos, a tsunami, an iceberg and the kind of disaster-movie logic that makes perfect sense if you stop asking questions. Same ship, same mistakes, brand-new reasons to stay on dry land.
Atlantic Rim
Giant sea monsters. Giant robots. A title that definitely wants you thinking about Pacific Rim. The Asylum’s kaiju-mech mash-up follows pilots battling enormous creatures rising from the Atlantic, and later achieved peak bad-movie immortality when it appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Few films sum up the studio’s appeal better, all the blockbuster ingredients, none of the blockbuster restraint.
The Day the Earth Stopped
Perhaps The Asylum’s finest act of mockbuster cheek. Released just before the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, this sci-fi disaster movie prompted legal attention from Fox but kept going anyway. Giant robots arrive, humanity faces annihilation and the title does just enough dancing around the obvious reference to become part of the legend. If Mockbuster is about anything, it is about this kind of move: bold, brazen and somehow still standing.
Taken together, these films are more than knock-offs. They are a parallel history of 21st-century movie culture, where audience awareness, home entertainment shelves, online searches and sheer nerve became production tools in their own right.
The Asylum understood something Hollywood was slower to admit: sometimes the title is the trailer, the concept is the marketing campaign and the joke is part of the pleasure. That is why Mockbuster feels overdue. Because behind the cheap effects, wild titles and lawsuit-dodging chaos is a studio that helped define an entire strain of modern cult movies.
Mockbuster is available on Digital from July 27.
