DOOM ASYLUM is a surprisingly graphic little independent horror film from the 1980s. The plot is predictable stuff but the execution is better than expected for the era, and this has more real horror in it than something contemporaneous like MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE. The main character is an unlucky chap who's involved in a car accident at the outset and then gets skinned by a blundering pathologist during his autopsy. The only problem? He's still alive!

The story then fades away as the setting moves to a real-life abandoned asylum. The killer bumps off a random bunch of annoying characters one by one but the real surprise is just how gory the deaths in this film are. The gore is achieved via prosthetic effects and make up and all of it is remarkably complex and original with some truly bizarre and sadistic ends for these annoying folk. The bloodshed is comparable to something like Scott Spiegel's INTRUDER and makes the film worth watching, more than compensating for the deficiencies in script, budget, and talent. Watch out for SEX AND THE CITY actress Kristin Davis long before she became famous.

The title "Doom Asylum" should identify that this is not a movie to take seriously. Indeed, it's all about having fun. Every stereotype of a slasher movie that there is, you'll find here. Of course, the movie's main significance nowadays is that it's the film debut of Kristin Davis, best known as Charlotte on "Sex and the City". So, the main thing that I took from this story of a disfigured man inhabiting an abandoned asylum is that Kristin Davis has a fine pair of legs on her. And that the leader of the punk band shows everyone her breasts. It definitely looks like a movie that they had fun filming. You're sure to love it.

House of the rising sun indeed!

Five teenagers check out an old abandoned asylum. They run across an obnoxious all-girl punk band. Of course, the stupid kids subsequently fall prey to vicious disfigured killer the Coroner (badly overplayed by Michael Rogan),who butchers the jerks in assorted gruesome ways with various autopsy tools. Directed with an appalling lack of skill and finesse by Richard Friedman, further marred by rank amateurish acting (future "Sex and the City" cable TV series regular Kristin Davis makes her inauspicious film debut as stuck-up bespectacled intellectual Jane, Ruth Collins snarls it up something awful as bitchy punk singer Tina, and Kenny L. Price grates on the nerves as insufferably nerdy baseball card buff Dennis),a generic hum'n'shiver synthesizer score by Dave Erlanger and Jonathan Stuart, lots of choice crummy dialogue (favorite line: "Your mom was a wonderful lady; if there's a heaven, then she's got a box seat"),laughably shoddy make-up f/x, groan-inducing attempts at witless spoofy humor (the wacko cracks these cheesy sub-Freddy Kruegerish one-liners every time he does the murderous deed),crude, unpolished cinematography by Larry Revene, and all the standard slasher clichés and stereotypes (the token black guy naturally buys the farm first),this gloriously ghastly low-budget atrocity commits all the right wrong stuff to rate highly as a real four-star stinkeroonie. Granted, the crumbling sanitarium location is genuinely cool and creepy, luscious "Penthouse" Pet Patty Mullen looks smoking hot in a two piece bikini, and ubiquitous 80's trash flick perennial Collins does her customary gratuitous topless scene, but overall this clunker is a special kind of lousy. A total cruddy hoot.