Audience Member
ay back to two weeks ago — time has no meaning in a pandemic — we watched "Shallow Graves" in the Full Moon remix anthology The Dead Reborn.
So yeah — this is the full length cut and it's all about a reality show called Chill Challenge that offers a million dollars to anyone who can survive a haunted house for one night. Has no one lerned any lessons in the histry of film?
Joe Estevez plays Stan the Investor who sets it all up. Brinke Stevens plays the ghost who is named Head Spectre in the credits. Woman are named things like Paige Turner and Rainbow. I'm shocked that there aren't black and white cans that just say beer in this what with all of the creativity that's on display.
Somehow, this was called Prison of the Dead 2 as a working title and didn't end up with that name. Come on, Full Moon. We depend on you for sequels and movies with small creatures that kill normal-sized people.
If you were demanded a version of Halloween: Resurrection that somehow sucked even more, this is your movie.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
Audience Member
If you are expecting gold from this movie, you're going to get garbage. But expect garbage, and you will get gold. This is one of my not-so-guilty pleasures, and its definitely in my top 3 favorite Full Moon films of all time (Dead and Rotting and Stitches being the other two). An entertaining B-horror that can be both fun to laugh at and chilling at the same time. Tanya Dempsey and Debra Mayer steal the spotlight in this amusing horror spoof on reality television, back when it was still a relatively new and fresh concept.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
Full Review
Audience Member
This is a pretty wild film, but then again anything from Full Moon Pictures is usually pretty wild. Don't go over board to get this one. What we have here is a game show called Chill Challenge where 5 sexy ladies are locked in a haunted house to see who wins a million bucks, reality TV, but like most reality TV its rigged, and one of the girls id the directors girlfriend so the million is safe, so we think, but the girls are getting knocked off one by one, by some grim reaper looking dudes that really take away from the movie. But we have some regular horror story babes un this one, Tanya Dempsey and Debra Mayer. Even our porn star Brinke Steves (hey a girls gotta make a buck.) Still I can only give it 3 stars, if we had a different slashed then grim reaper dudes that eat intestines, then it would have got more.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/23/23
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Audience Member
holy crap this movie is old school but it is awsum!!!
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
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Audience Member
Hell Asylum (aka Prison of the Dead 2) consists in tons of cheap, sadistic and mindless gore, a moronic plot... you know the rest. Hell Asylum are those find of cheap films directed by assholes who want to be as "brilliant", "macabre" and "gory" as Olaf Ittenbach. Among the worst films ever made, but had fun times with the low budget. And with this, of course, I mean the gore.
House of the Dead suddenly doesn't seem so bad.
11/100
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Remember "Halloween: Resurrection", the movie where a reality show producer had contestants spent the night in the "infamous Meyers house"? Well, imagine a film that's dumber and more cheaply than that one, and which features and awful script and some of the worst gore effects ever included in a commerical production. If you can imagine that, you have an idea of the awfulness that is "Hell Asylum".
In "Hell Asylum", disgraced television producer Max (Muskatell) is given one last chance by a production company exec (Estevez) to deliver a hit show. He conceives "Chill Challenge", a reality show where five sexy girls are locked in a haunted house for a night where they must complete challenges set by Max in order to win a share of one million dollars. Needless to say, Max's carnival spookhouse tricks are the least of the worries the girls are going to have.
[center][img]http://www.geocities.com/nuelow/movhellasylum.jpg[/img]
[i]The creator and contestants on "Chill Challenge", a reality game show where five girls
are locked in a haunted house.[/i]
[/center]
Released the same year as "Halloween: Resurrection", this film is either a case of not-so-great-minds thinking alike, or it's a case of someone trying to copy when they thought was a great idea. Whatever the origin of the idea behind the film, it's a lame one that's made even lamer by a bad use of the "helmet-cam" stchick that was also included in "Resurrection", where the actors are supposedly filming the footage as they move around. Here's it's used to show stairs. Nothing but stairs. And I even think it's the same set of stairs we're shown over and over.
Why not use the "helmet-cam" to show close-ups of the flesh-eating ghosts devour the contenstants? Why not use the device to evoke suspense and horror instead of boredom? Probably because it would require some degree of inventiveness in stretching a budget so low that they couldn't even afford raw sausages to double for intestines being ripped from victims. Instead, what we get looks a mophead dipped in spaghetti sauce (or maybe five cans of spaghetti and meatballs poured onto the chest of the actor. Whatever it is, the gore in this film is so unconvincing that I am amazed that professionals were willing to put their names to this movie. (And this goes for all the effects and costuming, with the exception of a fall down some stairs. It's the only place in the entire movie where any degree of inventiveness is shown, the only point where the film doesn't feel like it was made by a lazy crew who would really rather be working on some up-and-coming band's rock video.
Using the "helmet-cam" set-up for something more creative might have happened if the script for the film had been better. While the writerr did remember to put in some ghost attacks, he forgot to give us a reasonable explanation for [i]why[/i] the ghosts attack. Why do the ghosts eat the people they attack? Were they starved to death by their evil, Bluebeard-style husband? Were they demons that were summoned and then trapped in the house? Are they the by-product of the rumored mad science experiments that also took place in the house? The complete lack of any apparent thought given to the "why" of the supernatural attacks in the film make it seem all the more bad.
In fact, this movie is so bad that I have to wonder what made Charles Band allow the Full Moon label to be attached to it. Was he so hard up for cash and/or something to release that he was willing to sacrifice his still-very-bankable company name? There have reportedly been a number of movies over the years that Band produced but didn't want the Full Moon name associated with, because he felt they "didn't have that Full Moon magic". But he somehow felt this movie did?! And somehow he felt like he wanted his name on this film while he has used pseudonyms on much better pictures? (I know there are many reasons for creatives to use pseudonyms, but "Hell Asylum" doesn't seem like the sort of picture a well-established figure like Band would want to be associated with.)
The awfulness of the film is not the fault of the actors, by the way. The films leads all do a fine job, perhaps even better than the material warrants; it's almost a shame that Tanya Dempsy, Debra Mayer, Stacey Scowley and Sunny Lombardo are wasted in a movie like this, because all three of them appear to be talented actresses.
Speaking of Lombardo, she happens to be the focus of the only sections in the film the truly work, the only time this supposedly horror movie manages to evoke a sense of dread in the viewer. At a point in the film, Lombardo's character is horribly injured and the fesh-ripped ghosts come upon her as she lays there in great pain. She begs one of them to kill her... and it doesn't. It just lets her lay there and die a slow and very painful death. It's a seriously unsettling scene, and it made gives a little insight into what this movie could have been if its creators had bothered putting forward some real effort.
As it is, "Hell Asylum" is not worth your time.
Hell Asylum
Starring: Tanya Dempsy, Debra Mayer, Sunny Lombardo, Stacey Scowley, Timothy Muskatell, Olimpia Fernandez and Joe Estevez
Director: Danny Draven
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
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