PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I'm going to give away the ending of this film, but the film's Big Reveal is not its biggest asset. Rather, DOOM ASYLUM is one of the few humor-centered slasher-movies that qualifies as a irony rather than a comedy.
Comedies, even when they center upon jokey versions of killer psychos, usually allow one or more sympathetic characters to emerge unscathed. Ironies may utilize similar humor-tropes, but all of the characters are subjected to ridicule-- and this time, one of the results is that this time, the psycho-killer isn't the main character of the story.
Palimony lawyer Mitch Hansen is driving along with his new love Judy, implicitly a woman he met during one of his litigations. The car crashes, Judy dies, and the ambulance pronounces both Judy and Mitch dead. But Mitch, badly mangled by the accident, recovers while he's under the autopsy knife, which has made his deformation even worse. He kills the attending doctors and somehow escapes to an abandoned asylum. Apparently the place still has power, because he's able to sit around watching television, particularly a broadcast of an old Tod Slaughter film.
Two groups of teens converge on the asylum, despite having heard stories about other teens being mutilated on the grounds. A trio of female punk rockers, headed by Tina (Ruth Collins), gather on the roof to practice their music. Five other teens show up on the grounds to sun-bathe, and the rocker-girls pick a fight with them. As the two factions attempt to square off, Killer Mitch begins picking them off one by one with the standard gory deaths.
Director Richard Friedman, also credited as one of ASYLUM's writers, endows the doomed teens with all sorts of tics to make them more absurd than the standard cannon-fodder of the "serious" slasher. Mike and Kiki are nominally the "serious romantic couple," but Mike is a dunce who can't make up his mind. Kiki's not much better. When the punk girls mock the clean teens by throwing water-filled condoms at the latter, Mike picks up a dripping piece of plastic and Kiki comments, "Ew, that's like incest!" for some unrevealed reason. (Maybe they knew each other as neighbors since childhood?) Later, when Kiki pleads for divine assistance, she offers God money, sex, and a charge card. Jane (Kristin Davis, the only actor to go on to considerable fame) is a psychology nut, analyzing everyone, and Dennis collects baseball cards.
Of the three punk girls, Tina is the showiest, since she gets into a fight with Mike and kicks his ass. But Rapuzel's also good as the singer who keeps prating about "the bourgeoise," but when she's about to die reveals, "I voted Republican!" Davis might be the only actor who "made it," but all the performers do well.
Killer Mitch is no Michael or Jason either, and the TV-clips of Tod Slaughter are probably meant to suggest that his villainy is equally cornball. He almost gets defeated by Tina, but she falls victim to a packing-machine (why it's in an asylum, who knows). He forms a fixation on Kiki because he thinks she looks like Judy-- and there's a reason for that, because Kiki is Judy's daughter. But Kiki is also pissed because her dead mother was going to leave Kiki flat, and since she holds Mitch responsible for that, she kills him in an almost anti-climactic conclusion.
Determining the focal character in most slashers is easy because the mad killer is the common bond pulling together all the story-threads of his victims. In this case, the goofy teens are actually more interesting than the killer, even though most of them are still meant to be cannon fodder. This time, because the Final Girl exists to mete out ironic justice to the killer, I tend to think that Kiki takes pride of place, even though she's no less moronic than any other nut in this ASYLUM.
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