Review: Doom Asylum (1987)

Directed by: Richard Friedman
Starring: Patty Mullen, Ruth Collins, Kristin Davis
Written by: Rick Marx
Music by: Dave Erlanger, Jonathan Stuart
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Arrow Films)
IMDb

I’ve seen Doom Asylum a few times now and I still don’t know what the hell to make of it. It’s simultaneously the goofiest piece of shit you could ever concoct and an effectively phantasmagorical and kind of surreal slasher with some real nasty carnage. A group of yuppies, which includes Charlotte York Goldenblatt in her first on-screen role and Frankenhooker Patty Mullen, decides to picnic outside an creepy abandoned asylum, where they meet the greatest in-movie band ever, an all-woman avant-garde noise band called Tina and the Tots, that uses the premises, which can’t possibly have any electricity, for rehearsals. However, a horribly disfigured widower with a mean territorial streak is living there, and he’s no fan of visitors.

The batshittery starts immediately with a cast of characters that includes a rivethead of vaguely European origin whose accent fluctuates every few seconds; a flamboyant black man with bold fashion that’s sort of a parallel universe version of Hollywood Montrose from Mannequin (1987); a man-child who collects baseball cards and wears an oversized baseball cap and foggy coke-bottle glasses; and the killer, who, during an joyful murder spree, spouts ridiculously long and complex zingers that never land. Oddly, the only one here that ended up having any career acting success (Kristin Davis) vomits out the worst performance. Everyone else is having a good old time hamming shit up.

This isn’t so much a movie with a story as it is a collection of indelibly absurd moments, including myriad unironic full-throated cackles, a rooftop fight between a punk rock chick and a preppy dude featuring multiple dick punches, several really lengthy death scenes in which victims watch the instruments of their demise slowly approach for several seconds without any evasive maneuvers, 5 minutes of two flirting characters imagining they’re running happily towards each other in a field of flowers, and the real-time, hauntingly bizarre performance of the aforementioned greatest band ever. The whole thing takes place in broad daylight. The title logo looks scrawled by a 4-year-old. The music, swirling like an aged, ghostly Wurlitzer, provides appropriately lo-fi atmospherics.

The screenplay is inspired in a madcap sort of way, and there are multiple snippets of dialog that are non-sequitous masterstrokes. A boyfriend consoles his grieving girlfriend by saying, “I’m not your mother, and I never could be. But I can try.” She’s touched, and responds, for some reason, with, “Can I call you mom?” He says she can. It’s true love. The rivethead proclaims, “I’m gonna go scrawl some revolutionary slogans on the walls downstairs.” Her bandmate responds, “You mean you’ve gotta take a non-revolutionary leak? Take it here, we’ll watch …. ahhhh!” as she motions to her mouth because … she wants to drink it? The preppy dude, having discovered a murder scene, threatens, “You’re in a lot of trouble, torpedo-tits! I’m gonna get you for this! Well … maybe not me! But the cops! WHOEVER!” Heroic. There are so many similarly odd nuggets, few of which are appropriate for the circumstances under which they’re uttered.

Doom Asylum is gutter preposterousness that mostly succeeds thanks to its game actors, goofy but inventively gruesome special effects, ludicrously overwritten and cheeky screenplay, and a bold disregard for the kind of self-consciousness that would have driven most filmmakers to pause and ask, “What the hell is it we’re doing here?”

Overall rating: 8 out of 10