Lost and Found: Doom Asylum

First, a quick note: this review was written to evoke the delightfully lowbrow spirit of freewheeling fun from late night, cult movie show hosts (thank you, Elvira, Rhonda, and Joe Bob!) and glorious B-movie sites ( thank you, B-Movie Enema and House of Self Indulgence, to name just two!). I leaned into the over the top approach because Doom Asylum is a delightfully over the top movie, and it deserves nothing less than irreverent respect from this reviewer. So, please, read it with that delightfully lowbrow spirit in mind, and just let the good times roll.

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Have you ever watched a movie and been convinced it’s terrible, yet you keep finding reasons to love it anyway? That’s kind of how I felt while watching Doom Asylum (1987). It’s a hot mess, a horror-comedy where none of the jokes land but it’s still absolutely hilarious. Maybe that’s why it’s hilarious. Somehow the film manages to be inspired and inept, usually at the same time. How can you not love a movie that commits so hard to being so aggressively stupid?

Beyond just the insipid script and over the top acting, there’s plenty more to loathe/love. We begin with a couple speeding down a rural road in New Jersey. They’re fools for love, chugging champagne and making out without a care in the world when they almost drive head-on into an another car—turns out that driving while drinking and sucking face is not the safest way to drive. The man swerves just in time, but crashes spectacularly. The woman dies, the man weeps, and soon we learn he croaks too. Or does he? His zombified corpse snaps to and kills a couple of hapless medical examiners. I mean, I think he’s a zombie. The movie is never clear about this, but to me it’s the only explanation, so I’m going with it.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. The man is played by Michael Rogen. Who? That’s not the interesting part. This is the interesting part: the woman in the car is none other than the legendarily legtastic smoke show Patty Mullen, aka Frankenhooker herself!! How I’ve never written about the 1990 cult classic Frankenhooker is a mystery, but one I plan on solving one of these days. It’s legitimately one of my favorite B-movies of all time, and Patty Mullen’s hilarious lead performance (“Wanna date?”) is a big reason why. For now though, let’s bask in the glory of Patty playing, not one, but two parts in Doom Asylum: the floozy who dies in the car crash, and then when the movie jumps ahead ten years, Patty plays our Final Girl, who happens to be the floozy’s daughter. Twice the Patty Mullen for half the price! Or, if you watch this movie for free on Tubi like I did, then twice the Patty for no price!

As the delightfully named daughter Kiki, Patty spends almost the entirety of the decidedly lesser cult gem Doom Asylum looking astonishingly hot in a red bikini while tottering around on red high-heeled pumps. If you love Patty Mullen and her slammin’ body as much as I do, then this movie is your dream come true. Unfortunately, Patty only made two films before retiring from acting. Fortunately, those two films are Doom Asylum and Frankenhooker, both of which offer plenty of opportunities to gawk and drool over her drop-dead gorgeousness. She’s not just hot, though. Mullen has a real gift for comedy, and she’s downright hilarious in both films. In Doom Asylum, her exaggerated New Yawk accent only adds to both her comedic excellence and her smoking hotness.

Okay, I’m getting off track again. Or am I? Honestly the track I want to ride here is Patty and her astonishing sex appeal, which positively radiates off the screen, even when she’s being a dope, and she spends most of this movie being a dope. The entire cast act like dopes, in fact. A few of them are just annoying dopes (don’t get me started on the two dopes who fantasize about running through fields of flowers and falling in love with each other), while the others are masterfully entertaining dopes. Patty is in the latter category.

I’ll get to the other dopes in a minute, or maybe I won’t, because I just want to talk a little more about Patty Mullen and her bodacious body. Sweet Jesus, those legs go on for days, and you could bounce a quarter off that stomach. Kiki is very committed to being sexy, too. You don’t bring a pair of red pumps to wear with your red bikini while waltzing around a creepy, decrepit asylum unless you’re a sexual being, and Kiki is all about the sex. Not that there’s anything remotely approaching sex happening in this movie. It’s a very chaste film in that way, but with Kiki rolling her eyes (no one does bored detachment quite like Patty Mullen) and strutting about in a sexy red bikini and sexy red heels (have I mentioned her attire before?), who needs actual sex scenes? She brings the sex all on her own, just by being her sexy self. At one point, while stopping to pray to God (huh?), she says she’ll give the Big Guy whatever he wants if he saves her and boyfriend Mike from the killer. She even offers sex, if that’s what God wants. God definitely wants your sex, Kiki. So does everyone else.

Kristin Davis and Ruth Collins are no slouches in the hotness category either. Davis, of course, went on to star in the obscenely popular Sex and the City, but this is where her career started and, bold statement, I think it was all downhill after Doom Asylum. Think about it: does Kristin Davis appear in the most crotch-exposing one-piece bathing suit in history in Sex and the City? I didn’t watch that dumb show, but I don’t think she wore anything remotely like what she wears in Doom Asylum. As Jane, the “smart” dope of the group, she wears a royal blue swimsuit (or body suit of some sort), gigantic glasses and spouts all sorts of pseudo-intellectual claptrap. How are we supposed to hear what she’s saying though, when her spectacularly groomed crotchal region is on such eye-popping display all the time?

Is “crotchal” even a word? I don’t care, it is now. Seriously though, Davis is all hips, crotch, and sexy nerd girl glasses in Doom Asylum, all of which are just enough to make up for her character’s incessant yammering. Have I mentioned that the camera really loves Jane’s crotchal region? I’m trying to set a record for most uses of “crotchal region,” which won’t be difficult, because I’m assuming no one else has ever really tried before. I’m a pioneer in that way. So are Jane and Jane’s crotchal region!

This review has really gone off the rails, what with all this slobbering praise for Patty Mullen’s legtastic lusciousness and Kristin Davis’s magnificently manicured lawn. Five paragraphs in, and I haven’t even outlined the plot yet! So, ten years after the car accident, a group of stupendously dopey young friends go to hang out at an old, abandoned asylum somewhere deep in the backwoods of Jersey. Because of course they do. Young people have the strangest taste in hangout locations, don’t they? Turns out the asylum is home to the skin-flayed walking corpse Mitch, and he doesn’t like visitors. On the day the dopey gang arrives, the asylum’s rooftop is also being used by what might be the most awesome industrial-goth-punk band in movie history, Tina and the Tots. They’re all dopes too, but Tina is an enormously sexy and kickass dope. She also completes the holy trinity of stone-cold goddesses in this film, alongside lovely, leggy dope Mullen and hiptastic, crotchtastic dope Davis. I should use character names because I certainly don’t think the actors themselves are dopes. They just play really sexy dopes.

Where were we? Oh right, Tina! She’s a cackling badass in sky high, dominatrix-style stiletto boots who puts up a terrific fight with killer Mitch, later in the film. Ruth Collins is so freaking amazing here that I wanted Tina to get her own spinoff movie. And I haven’t even mentioned her impressively toned highs or lasciviously lacquered cherry-red lips that send the mind reeling with thoughts of said lips wrapped around—

—um, ahem, we’re really off the rails now, aren’t we? I feel like I’ve spent so much time drooling over Patty, Kristin, and Ruth that I neglected to mention how much padding director Richard Friedman does in this movie by constantly cutting to clips from old, black and white horror movies that Mitch watches in between the killings (apparently someone’s still paying Con Ed to keep the lights on). It’s beyond irritating and happens after nearly every scene. It’s ridiculous.

I haven’t even mentioned much about Mitch but that’s because he kind of sucks, with his stupid and very unfunny one-liners and his ugly, flayed face. But this movie isn’t about the rampaging killer, it’s about an astonishingly babelicious cast that few films in cinematic history can match, on a babe for babe basis. Besides most giallo movies, of course. I should add, Doom Asylum also has pretty gross gore effects. We’re not talking Tom Savini level here, but the kills are memorably bloody, as Mitch offs the dopey kids with a variety of tools left behind in the medical examiner’s office. Still, you don’t watch Doom Asylum for Mitch. You watch Doom Asylum for Kiki, Jane, and Tina. Those are just the facts. Oh, sure, William Hay as Kiki’s dopey, indecisive bohunk Mike is pretty darn funny eye candy himself, but we all know he’s just there to worship Kiki and get his ass kicked by Tina in an absurdly long, yet delightfully entertaining fight scene. It’s a one-sided fight, actually, as Tina beats the snot out of Mike from start to finish. I told you, she’s bad to the bone, the sort of girl you bring home to your parents if you hate your parents but love having sex with crazy, industrial-goth-punk babes.

Anyway! So, to sum up, watch Doom Asylum for Kiki, Jane, and Tina, then stick around for all of the goofy extra bits that would probably be really annoying if it weren’t for Kiki, Jane, and Tina. Their combined hotness is off the charts and makes the movie far more entertaining and memorable than it has any right to be. The simple reality is I only wrote 1,000+ words* about Doom Asylum because the combustible sex appeal of Patty Mullen, Kristin Davis, and Ruth Collins compelled me to do so. I wrote this entire post in a fugue state brought on by the electrifying charms of Patty’s incomparable gams, Kristin’s crotchal prowess, and Ruth’s suggestively hypnotic lips. I was powerless against them all, I tell you. Powerless!

*Jesus H. Christ, I just wrote one-thousand words on freakin’ Doom Asylum. I repeat: powerless!

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Doom Asylum is currently streaming on Tubi.