I’ve seen at least 150-200 Asylum films. Maybe more. Could I tell you all the titles? Absolutely not. Could I tell you who was in them, what they were about, or where one suspiciously familiar giant monster ends and another begins? Also no. At a certain point, the titles blur together into one glorious mush of sharks, asteroids, mega-creatures, fake blockbusters, weather events and Eric Roberts looking like someone phoned him five minutes before the camera rolled.
Shockingly, The Asylum has made and released more than 500 movies since it started in 1997. That’s right, the creators of the mockbuster have been in business for almost 30 years and, regardless of quality, that is a milestone worth celebrating. Because here’s the thing: it is very easy to laugh at The Asylum. In fact, for many people, that is the point.
This is the studio that made an empire out of films that look like they were legally advised to stand six feet away from whatever blockbuster was popular that month. They have titles that sound like someone lost a bet. They have CGI creatures that appear to have been rendered using a free software CD from the cover of What PC magazine circa the 90s. They have scripts where exposition is not so much delivered as emptied into the room with a shovel, usually while being screamed.
After watching Mockbuster, it is a lot harder not to respect them for all their Ed Wood-ish moviemaking. They understand their market, they know exactly how this side of the business works, and the whole team has the discipline and sheer stubbornness to make a movie in 6-10 days.
Mockbuster follows filmmaker Anthony Frith as he gets pulled into the world of The Asylum, the company best known for Sharknado and its endless line of bargain-bin cousins to Hollywood hits. After contacting The Asylum and asking if he could direct one of their movies, Frith gets an unexpected response: they say yes. The catch is that he will have just six days to make his feature film debut.
Frith’s job is simple in theory: make a film quickly, cheaply and under conditions that would make most filmmakers lie down in a car park and quietly become part of the tarmac. As for what he will be making, it is another Asylum version of The Land That Time Forgot. You can likely predict the end result. It is The Asylum, after all.
What works best is that the doc does not approach The Asylum like a freak show. It knows why people find this world interesting and funny, but it also understands that behind every ridiculous title is a group of people trying to solve very real production problems with almost no time, money or margin for self-importance. There’s a part of me that thinks every upcoming filmmaker should have to make a movie with The Asylum. If a director can make a 90-minute film under these conditions, they will be battle-ready should they ever get a big studio project.
That is where Mockbuster becomes something more than a simple “look how bad these films are” documentary. Anyone can point at a cheap shark movie and say it looks cheap. The more interesting question is: how does a company keep making them? How do you build a production model where speed is not a failure of the system, but the system itself? How do actors, crew and directors make something usable when the schedule is measured in days rather than weeks?
The answer, based on Mockbuster, seems to be a mix of madness, pragmatism and a total lack of preciousness. There is something weirdly refreshing about watching people make films without the usual indie-film mythology wrapped around them. No one has time to sit around discussing the soul of cinema. There is a costume issue, a location problem, a shot to get before lunch, and a monster that needs to exist whether the budget agrees or not.
Frith is a good guide through this because he seems both excited and overwhelmed by the opportunity. He is not presented as a slick industry operator strolling into the machine with all the answers. He is a filmmaker trying to hold onto some creative ambition during his feature debut while being battered by the reality of a production environment that does not care about his feelings.
The doc is also smart about The Asylum’s place in the ecosystem. These films are easy to dismiss, but they exist because there is an audience for them. Sometimes that audience is watching ironically. Sometimes they genuinely love the chaos. Sometimes they just want 90 minutes of nonsense with a title that promises exactly what it delivers. There is an honesty in that, even when the films themselves are absurdly dishonest in their proximity to bigger releases. And that, weirdly, is where the respect creeps in.
The Asylum may not be making masterpieces, but they are making films. Constantly. Efficiently. Shamelessly. In a world where countless projects never get past a pitch deck, there is something almost heroic about a studio that says, “Fine, we’ll make the shark thing by Friday.” Mockbuster does not make me suddenly want to defend every Asylum film as misunderstood art. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are barely films in any meaningful way. I will say this: The Asylum’s process of requiring costumes to be signed off on day one of production, and not at any earlier point, utterly baffled me. Forget the questionable sets, cast disagreements and wobbly CGI, I just could not understand this bizarre production method.
For fans of bad movies, B-movies, bargain-bin creature features and the strange business of exploitation cinema, Mockbuster is absolutely worth a look. It is funny, scrappy and surprisingly affectionate, and Frith has done a great job turning his feature film debut into an insightful look behind the scenes of The Asylum. More importantly, it understands that “bad” films are still made by people who care, panic, compromise, improvise and keep going.
After watching more than 150 Asylum films, I still could not confidently explain the difference between half of them. But will I watch their next giant creature versus slightly different giant creature movie? 100%.
Mockbuster is out now on Digital.
