Asylum films (knock offs galore!)

Galvasean

I was reading this months Empire magazine. On page 102 there is an article about a film studio called Asylum who specialize in making cheapo rip off movies. Some of the ones featured:
Alien Vesrsus Hunter (Alien Versus Predator)
The DaVinci Treasure (The DaVinci Code)
I Am Omega (I Am Legend)
Pirates of Treasure Island (Pirates of the Carribean)
Snakes on a Train (Snakes on a Plane)
Transmorphers (Transformers)
War of the Worlds (er... War of the Worlds)

Has anyone here seen any of these? To be honest a couple of them might actually be better than the films they are aping...

Karl Hungus

Havok has seen loads of them, as far as I know. Mostly absolute garbage as far as I've read, so I wouldn't be running out to buy any.

mike65

The porn versions are proberly better.

Mike.

Venom

I watched Transmorphers for about 10 minites and it was absolute muck. Imagine Z list celeb B movies from the 80's only 50 times worse and you will have an idea how bad Transmorphers is

I've seen most of them and the vast majority are trashy fun. They have been involved with the odd good film, Evil Eyes was very good, but it seems to be the exception to the rule.

Wacker

Pirates of Treasure Island stars Lance Henrikson. How did he ever fall so far?

Those guys should be ashamed of themselves. Have they no integrity whatsoever?

mike65

Lance Henriksen has appeared in any number of Sci-Fi Channel productions in the last 2 years. I doubt any are worth the petrol and match required to be rid of them.

Mike.

FX Meister

Movies 4 Men and Movies 4 Men 2 on Sky Digital show loads of their movies. Channel 325 and 327. My lady friend works for those channels and told me about some of them.

FX Meister

FX Meister wrote: »

Movies 4 Men and Movies 4 Men 2 on Sky Digital show loads of their movies. Channel 325 and 327. My lady friend works for those channels and told me about some of them.

I know that Zone Horror show their films, but I've never come across them on Movies for Men.

small

For the most part they suck sooooo badly that they're hilarious to watch.

This production company seems to make its money out of releasing knock offs of blockbuster films straight to video as soon as possible after their release upon the premise that someone who liked the movie will go to the video shop, see the similar title and rent it, presuming it's linked to the original. They hire an inexperienced cast and crew cheaply, who are willing to work on the feature for experience. If you look up some of the titles on IMDB you'll see directors etc posting about them. They have begun showing on Movies4Men since the start of this year.

TerrorFirmer

I have seen nearly all of them. Alien vs Hunter and Universal Soldiers were the last two I've seen and both were embarrassingly bad. Universal Soldiers to be specific, shares nothing in common with the obvious film in question yet features an exact giant 100ft tall replica of the Terminator skeleton as the arch baddy. All you can really do is laugh...if you've actually managed to make it this far into the movie, you really would have to have some sense of humour...that or a dedication to seeing even the worst b-movie through.... Some of their movies are actually OK, Hillside Cannibals for one, is enjoyable but then again the fail point for most of these movies is the fact that the movie plots calls for large amounts of CGI, which, unsurprisingly, is of absolutely horrific quality - think the PSX 2000 era.

The ones that really either totally for primarily on plain old make up and prosthetics are quite good - I Am Omega was OK for the most part, though falls apart a bit, and Snakes on a Train was pretty fun until the terrible ending that, you guessed it, relies on CGI. Terrible, laughable, pre Lawnmower man style CGI. The rest of the lower key releases, The Hitchhiker, Death Valley, Killers etc...all pretty enjoyable. Pretty much anything they make that's devoid of CGI seems to also retain the only vestiges of an actual proper film too, conincidentally, as most of them are not rip offs of high profile CGI fests and need something to gain some recognition on their own merits, and not just an intriguingly similar title.

War of the Worlds was the best one though in exception to that above sentence, again, dreadful special effects (at least, for animate objects, the static shots were actually quite cool), but good acting and it was enjoyable.

Can't wait to see this one, it even has the same home camera style approach.

I've seen most of their movies, but there's one or two that I haven't seen - the more 'original' ones which are not as much in demand. I don't really watch that many B-Movies anymore but anything from Asylum, UFO or Nu-Image usually captures my attention.

I keep meaning to start a blog for b-movies, but I never get around to it...

Oh and - here's my original review to Snakes on a Train