This next story makes me kinda maudlin, o my readership, so bear with me whilst I type it. There are already tearstains on my keyboard, and I’m not even all the way in yet. I’m all angsty, and for a good reason: The Asylum Home Entertainment.

Oh How The Mighty Have Fallen

You need to understand that, back in the early part of the twenty-first century, The Asylum was a company that took risks, took chances, and created some very interesting direct-to-video horror movies. Stuff like Haunted House and Corpses Are Forever were part and parcel of a studio that may not always have turned out a winner, but at least could be counted on to try something new. But then, The Asylum’s priorities visibly changed. They began producing and releasing a slew of fast, cheap and utterly sleazy knockoffs of major motion pictures, often within days of their release to theatres.

It All Started With Hillside Cannibals

You know a movie studio’s desperate when it’s prepared to release a cheesy knockoff of a Wes Craven bomb, and Hillside Cannibals was The Asylum’s version of The Hills Have Eyes, only recently released to theatres as a remake. It didn’t stop there—When A Stranger Calls was Asylumized (as one critic put it) to become When A Killer Calls. Snakes on a Plane became Asylumized to be Snakes on a Train, Transformers became Transmorphers, and even Alien Vs. Predator wound up staring at its own inbred cousin Alien Vs. Hunter.

These were not well received—though they made The Asylum plenty of money, critics universally and roundly lambasted the cheesy knockoffs and the entire philosophy behind them—and really only succeeded because by Hollywood standards they were fantastically low budget. Even Transmorphers was made for right around one million dollars, chicken feed by movie standards.

Folks…I’ll be clear with you. There are vastly, vastly better movies out there than the unoriginal ripoff dreck The Asylum shovels into the marketplace. I know because I was there when they got started, and they were making a lot of it. If you want good and cheap, it’s out there, and it’s not carrying The Asylum’s logo on it.

But even better and downright free is the Kwanzoo movie trivia on all manner of The Asylum ripoff targets and ripoff targets to be. Try out Transformers for a start!

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