It’s easy to dismiss the studio behind such films as MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS, TRANSMORPHERS, DEATH RACERS, THE TERMINATORS and countless others. Low production values, dubious attempts at association with A-list titles, sub-par acting; there are plenty of reasons one can dredge up scorn to heap on this studio. It’s almost too easy. That is why today I’m going to ask you to reconsider those thoughts and look a bit deeper into The Asylum its place is in the world of cinema.

The film world has always been roughly subdivided into the A class pictures and the B class pictures. A movies have the big stars, the proven directors, the big budgets, the ground breaking special effects. The best of everything. By contrast, the B pictures have to often make do on a little less. Or make that a lot less.  Leaner budgets mean relatively unknown casts and directors. The crew can be grizzled vets or some guys the director knows. Your paycheck is often late, sometimes doled out in the form of pizza and beer. Craft service is Kraft Mac and Cheese and a warm Miller High Life.

So why is it we need these B movies anyway? Sounds like they kind of suck. Why shouldn’t we be fine with a world where there is only room in audiences’ hearts for big blockbuster A-list flicks?

Big budgets, big risks. Producers are staking heaps of dough on a movie and they want that money back. They damned well want a cast with some proven box office draw, a script that is designed to put asses in seats and a director with a track record of making bank. When a few million or tens (hundreds) of millions are riding on the line, you better believe there are three words on the minds of the moneymen that get branded on everyone else’s foreheads: Return on Investment.

ROI. In French, this means King and in Hollywood, money is the ruler. If you keep putting ROI on the throne, they will let you keep working. The quality of what you are doing doesn’t matter one bit. Not the artistic merit, not the creative spirit. Ideas and imagination are great but aren’t necessary for a career in Tinseltown, what matters most is rendering unto Caesar. Great big bags of it. Which isn’t to say Hollywood doesn’t make art and doesn’t make quality films because it does, but let’s not pretend the people dumping millions into film production are philanthropists. They do so because they expect to see it back and then some.

The B pictures are where ideas and experimentation rule because sometimes that is all you have. You don’t have the money to do the big effect so you need to figure out how to achieve the same thing for less. You don’t have a dozen locations around the world, you’ve got a few spots you can shoot at and maybe even legal permits to do so. Yet ,somehow with all these limitations, we find creativity blossoming.

In 2009, the Asylum took a risk on a film written and directed by Jack Perez (credited as Ace Hannah). Perez was a working man’s director who had this monster movie script and Asylum dared to make it. The movie, of course, was MEGA SHARK vs. GIANT OCTOPUS and it gave us that iconic scene where the titular mega shark leaps and bites an airliner right out of the sky. The scene is a madcap masterpiece of absurd monster fun and millions of YouTube hits followed. In fact, far more people have seen that clip than have seen the full movie, no question. Also not in question is that scene’s iconic status in the popular culture. It was a massive internet meme and spawned infographics, parodies and photoshops that have been swapped and shared globally.

What became of Perez? He and Ryan Levin made the recent horror-comedy, festival favorite SOME GUY WHO KILLS PEOPLE (see Fango's review) which has won acclaim from audiences and critics alike the world over. It’s a smart, funny picture.  I can’t say how much of the experience making MEGA SHARK contributed to the man’s success, but I can’t imagine he made a movie and took nothing of value from the experience. 

More recently, there was NAZIS AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, the movie with a Mecha-Hitler in it and which plays weirdo Nazi occult conspiracies and historical revisionism for both scares and laughs. This movie had exactly *zero* chance of ever being made by a big studio and once again, the Asylum stepped up and took a gamble. Putting first time director (and long-time visual FX maestro) Joseph Lawson at the helm, the material was so extreme at times, so potentially offensive, it needed a gentle touch and sturdy footing to hit the right balance. Lawson excelled and oversaw the most visually ambitious and arguably most entertaining Asylum film released to date. Playing on pop-mythology, the movie delivers an imaginative world that frankly a lot of people were interested in, but never expected to actually see portrayed on screen. Currently, it’s one of the more popular films on Netflix and Lawson is just completing principal photography on his third feature film.

You can say The Asylum cynically turns out knock offs and I will tell you directly the people who work on these films are sincere, hardworking people who are finding their way in the industry. They are out there making movies, honing their individual crafts and working their hearts out to make the best films they can produce under the circumstances. It must also be noted that many of these “knockoffs” are fully realized original ideas which have been titled and marketed to share competitive space with bigger films. TRANSMORPHERS, for example, isn’t some cookie-cutter rip off of the Bay films. It has its own universe it lives in which also happens to have giant robots.

Even the films that more closely follow the plot paths of the blockbusters they are emulating tend to get there in their own unique way. ALIEN ORIGIN, for example, is more accurately an alternate vision of PROMETHEUS, not a copy. A possibility that we get to examine and can judge on its own merits. A chance to see what might have been in different hands with different budgets.

You can question the quality of what The Asylum does, but I’d say they keep getting better and better and that’s what we’d expect to see from an incubator of new talent. You can question the business choices they make with how they market some of their films, fair enough. What you shouldn’t question is the sincerity of the people making the films, and the services the B movies provide for the health of the industry overall and the diversity of the films we as viewers get to experience.

That’s why, at 15 years-old and counting, The Asylum matters and so does the entire B industry. They deserve our support because this sector of filmmaking is in danger and if we lose it, we lose all the incredible art, talent and potential it has given us over the decades. 

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