The Asylum

  • Battledogs (2013)

    Battledogs (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I’m at a point where even seeing “The Asylum presents” in the opening credits of a film can be enough to make me think about shutting it off and watching something else. But the remote was too far away and I was doing something else and what was the worst that could happen, right? Well, as it turns out, Battledogs is still not a good movie… but it’s not as bad as what I was expecting. This tale of werewolves/zombies/monsters/whatever running rampant over Manhattan is executed with more skill than I expected from yet another made-for-Syfy production. There are a few known names in the production (Dennis Haysbert, Ernie Hudson, Ariana Richards and Wes Studi), but the film’s most distinguishing characteristic is the energy in which it executes its rote plotting of monster attacks and military super-soldier nonsense. Its quantity-over-quality approach to special effects is defensible (how else are you going to get an exploding helicopter on a budget?), and the actors don’t do too badly. There’s even something that looks suspiciously like non-CGI effects here. But please understand that I’m grading on a curve here, and even saying something like “this isn’t the worst Asylum/Syfy film I’ve even seen” is far from being an absolute compliment. Still, we all rate films according to expectations, and mine were exceeded in watching Battledogs.

  • Martian Land (2015)

    Martian Land (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2018) I’ve been bingeing on classic cinema for months now, and I had almost forgotten what a truly wretched movie could feel like. Now, thanks to Martian Land, I’ve just had a quick and painful reminder. Produced by the infamous The Asylum production company in anticipation of The Martian, this is a film that keeps its quality as low as its budget. From a nondescript premise to terrible execution, there aren’t that many redeeming qualities to the film. In fact, it’s most fascinating when it shows that terrible movies cannot use the same tools as good movies. When bad actors get angry in terrible scripts, they become laughable rather than fearsome. When heroic deaths are sprinkled everywhere in a script that does not deserve them, they feel cheap and hollow, perhaps even reprehensible. There are a lot of special effects, and they are not good even with the possibilities of CGI. Things don’t make sense but our investment in the result is so low that it doesn’t really matter. I won’t try to claim that it’s one of the worst movies ever: that would be singling out a film that is simply too dull to be singled out. Every so often, I see a promising logline in the TV guide and record the movie just for the curiosity factor, but Martian Land will help me cure myself from the habit of doing so. It’s just dull. I’ve written too much about it already.