I’ve lamented the downright lethargic, nearly comatose state and distinct disinterest, so nested and in a rot The Asylum is with their output in this last period, i’ve done that before.
It’s clear whatever “magic” they summoned with Sharknado didn’t last long, and now just rest on their laurels, so to speak, as even the usual aficionados of trash got disinterested in the same way the company itself seems to be with whatever they cram out, they keep doing their thing but just because it’s what they have always done, and will keep doing until there’s not any money left off mockbustering.
I remember from a class in genre cinema i once took that – broadly speaking – a genre has reached a stage of severe stagnation when it starts becoming metatextual, to speak of itself more than anything else, as it can obstensibly find nothing else to iterate on, so it “turns on itself”.
And while it no longer hold completely true, as we’re now in a post-meta phase, if you will, there’s still a valid argument in there, because films like Monster Armageddon (released as 2025 Armageddon in trying to fool more people) validate the implied drying up of the “creative well”, and are a testament to this decade of post-irony, meta overdosing incestinal multiverse crossovers, of finding out there’s no bottom of the barrel, no real lowest of the low that can’t be “improved” upon.
I remember buying the DVD for this one for 5 bucks, sight unseen, on Amazon back in 2023, i knew it was an Asylum joint, and the cover art was nice, featuring a lots of monsters and creatures.
As with Monster Island (their mockbuster response to 2019’s Godzilla II: King Of The Monsters), the cover art is way better than the movie itself, but this time around it isn’t a complete lie like it was with that movie… as in it’s not technically a lie.
It’s worse… or is it?
So, the deal is that the Asylum couldn’t be arsed to make a new movie for their 25th anniversary, so a bright spark at the company decided they didn’t need to shot that much footage, as they could just Godfrey Ho their way to a 90 minutes release by stitching together footage from some of their previously released film… and yet they didn’t even do that.
The framing, i won’t lie, might have made for a fun time, as there’s an alien race that starts attacking Earth with monsters and geological/natural disasters that look similar to those seen in Asylum films… because they got the signal from The Asylum’s Movie Channel and thought the films were fictionalized Earth mithology, so they 3D print low resolution (because the internet for streaming in space sucks as well) replicas of the monsters to further their invasion of Earth.
There’s a brainwashing by the aliens subplot and the protagonists being estranged twins that at a young age bonded over their love of Asylum’s trash like when they grandma accidentally got them Snakes On A Train instead of Snakes On A Plane (i didn’t made this up, Marc Gottlieb, Glenn Campbell and Tammy Klein did, as their credited as writers, according to the IMDB page of the film, at least) to fatten a plot still obviously made to justify this reuse of footage, mostly from 3 of their Mega Shark movies, but also their Transformers and Pacific Rim knock-offs, without forgetting Sharkenado.
… and yet it’s not a Gamera: Super Monster situation, where it’s more of a glut of stock footage from previous movies than an actual film, it’s not quite that.
It’s more akin to what in gaming is defined as an “asset flip”, as they reuse some of the models of the various giant monsters/creatures/robot from previous films in other newly shot contexts with other actors, they didn’t just stole entire scenes verbatim from their older films, which it’s more effort than i warranted… until they don’t even bother doing these brief monster/robot/creature sequences and we’re just told that offscreen a giant snake attacked people on a train in Tokyo— PICK ONE.
They don’t, but they do eventually craft a monstrosity made of various bits of the other giant monsters to fight against the bootleg Autobot for 20 seconds…
This ultimately means it’s both uber lazy and not completely devoit of effort at the same time, though it’s a moot point since they could have actually made new monsters or creatures for what would essentially be a generic alien invasion flick, if the meta elements weren’t there, and make no mistake, this is still a case where they first wanted to reuse old material and then from there figured out how to write a meta-plot full of self-deprecating/advertising humour around that, as the “glued-on” story is full of plot holes so big one could swear to have seen Jimmy Hoffa in there, as characters in cheap “army uniforms” and suited dudes on desk with the American flag demand to deploy or do something, or tells us shit we should have been shown.
But by the end it’s clear they completely stopped caring at all, since suddendly we have zombies (to recycle Zoombies models like the zombie koala), then brainwashed humans that nearly act and look identical, then at random the 3d printed monsters are sucked away back into a wormhole that the mothership, it’s so sudden and badly edited i had to rewind because i genuinely thought i -somehow – missed something… NOPE, we’ll have the two actresses talk about that by gaslighting the audience in believing the events in the finale being somewhat of a win, kinda, mostly to set up a sequel that might already happened and i don’t know, maybe doesn’t exist yet.
Still, there’s still more effort than one would expect from the “Asylum stock footage film”, even though the plot it’s basically the “Single Female Lawyer” episode from Futurama stretched to…. well, almost barely 82 minutes, with cheap meta self-deprecating humour meant more as a vehicle for The Asylum to promote their own crap even more shamelessly than usual…
And yet it’s surprisingly tolerable, it’s not as unbearable to see/get through as one would expect, but it’s really lazy even for them, the plots it’s a deliberate mess that can’t even stay focused on itself for its below 90 minutes runtime, but it delivers some modicum of entertaiment, despite everything, and the meta elements aren’t as grating as possible, then again, when you’re on the bandwagon that taking the piss out of you, when you’re too much in making fun of your own stuff, it makes any real comedy attempt crumble, even more so when you could make some jokes and instead figured it’s a good time as any to go and show the “Space Balls souvenir shop”.
Still, by pure chance there’s some admittedly so bad it’s good moments, like the shitty CG pig being helicopter carried (forgot why in context, not that it matters), but it’s still in the “pretty shitty and not really that entertaining” category, beyond the subpar but yet into the rectum abyss, one that keeps getting more entries as time goes by and the company keeps cranking films out to increasingly dimishing returns, alongside even more disinterest.
I would be less harsh if this was just something they released on Youtube or somewhere else for free, i mean, it’s a huge self-deprecating joke at their own expenses made for their 25th anniversary, fine, but when an important plot point is that it looks like someone is gaming the numbers on binge watching or marathoning Asylum films, thinking it’s some scheme to inflate sales or something monetary… then actually charging for a film that applies the “asset flip” method just kills any irony and goodwill they could have gained with them being a bit too willing to indulge in a self-deprecating farce that doubles as a diegetical advertising machine for their crap.
It’s still better than their Titanic 2, i guess.
Wise Cafe (International) 