Horror Movie Review: Doom Asylum (1987)

Directed by Richard Friedman and starring Michael Rogen, Patty Mullen, Kristin Davis and Ruth Collins. Doom Asylum is a horror-comedy that has bad acting, terrible dialogue, awful effects and a nonsensical story yet is an entertaining movie.

It opens with a car crash. One involving Mitch (Michael Rogen) and Judy (Patty Mullen) who are so in love, they get distracted and have a bad accident. In it, Judy is killed and Mitch is badly hurt. Distraught, he appears to die too and is taken to the morgue. Once there the coroner and his assistant start his autopsy but midway, Mitch wakes up and finds himself badly disfigured.

Furious and heart-broken, he kills the pair violently. This opening is very gratuitous, the bloody effects shocking if not a bit silly.

Fast-forward to many years later and Mitch now haunts an abandoned asylum where he is said to kill anyone who explores it with autopsy tools. Of course, nobody believes the stories until a group of young, very 80’s looking and acting adults decide to check it out.

Cue much blood.

Yes, Doom Asylum is trash, utter trash that most viewers will have a real hard time getting through. However, the absurdity of it all and the over the top nature of the gluttonous gore does have charm. It’s horribly acted, so much so that most here shouldn’t have ever got work again. However, the deadpan delivery of jokes will eventually wear many down to where it becomes enjoyable.

It’s like Doom Asylum is so stupid, that your brain-cells begin to evaporate so it becomes more fun.

The star of the film is the gore really and Doom Asylum has plenty of it. It’s gratuitous as hell and would be far more visceral if it wasn’t so fake looking a lot of the time. One particular scene involving toes is so clearly just a rubber foot. Still, the red stuff flows like water from a tap.

There will be just as many who hate every minute of Doom Asylum as those who love it. It’s a terrible movie but for entertainment value, it delivers.