Max is a TV producer, attempting to pitch his latest show idea to his boss (a short cameo from Joe Estevez!). His show is ‘The Chill Challenge’, where five young women will be locked in a haunted house overnight and forced to do challenges derived from their worst fears. The boss eventually gives the green light and a crew is sent out to a mysterious house to install all the cameras needed for the show. Two technicians, one of which is the film’s writer Trent Haaga (Terror Firmer), are seen installing one of the cameras and while testing it out, are brutally slaughtered by a mysterious hooded figure, sending blood and guts all over the place. However this doesn’t seem to bother the makers of the show one bit, and we next see Max and a cameraman leading the five contestants into the house, and we are given introductions to each one through pieces of interview footage from their auditions.

Our first contestant is Stacy, she’s a sweet girl without a thought in her head. She doesn’t even care about the prize money, she just wants to be on TV and have fun, can’t watch too much TV can she? Contestant number 2 is Rainbow, though her parents were hippies she went in quite a different direction, that of a pretentious Goth who spouts crap like “death doesn’t scare me”, though admits that the thought of a long period of extreme physical pain sort of frightens her, that’s just her and the rest of the world then? Number 3 is Amber, a typical annoying blonde who has such words of wisdom as “these ghosts had better be boys”, and is scared of bugs and creepy crawlies. Our fourth participant is Marti, she’s black and as horror rules dictate, she is sassy! She’s afraid of small spaces, but she makes it clear she doesn’t take any crap (remember, she’s sassy). When asked about how she feels about haunted houses she says “I haven’t given it much thought, why?” so not only is she sassy, she doesn’t pay attention either. Our final contestant is Paige, who wants to be an actress and be super famous one day, that alone is what she feels makes her worthy to be on the show. Her greatest fear? Being a normal person and not being famous, terrifying.

With the girls inside, Max locks the door and goes into the history of where the game will take place, the Mason House. Max tells the story of the owner of the house, Phineas Mason ran the local cotton factory in the 19th century and was very wealthy. He was a cruel and sadistic man who took wives from the local countryside, one every year for ten years, each one suffering a cruel fate at the hands of them man’s sick insanity. The locals could do little, needing his employment too much to do anything about it. After Mason died and left no heirs, the house lay empty for a long time, until the turn of the 20th century when it was used as an asylum. However it was not the ideal place for one, as if anything the inmates became more insane during their stay. After that it was believed that the place was in fact haunted by the ten murdered Mason brides. Max goes over the rules with the girls, they will stay in a central room until one by one they are called off to take part in individual challenges, taking instructions from a headset and TV screens. The girls bicker amongst themselves until Marti is told to put on a headset and leave the room. The show takes advantage of the fears the contestant had stated during their auditions, so because Marti said she didn’t like confined spaces they lock her in a closet and start turning up the heat to freak her out. Marti is forced into quitting and throws off the headset and goes to leave, but never makes it out after a hooded figure appears and offs her in grisly fashion. Dumb-assed horror conventions mean that not only is the black person the first to die (and she was sassy), nobody else knows that she has just been killed and carry on like nothing has happened, despite the house being FULL of cameras. Everything is pretty formula from here as the hooded apparitions wreak havoc with the flimsiest of reasons why, and the girls continue to find that telling what they fear most comes back to bite them on their asses. Who will make it out alive? Who would you like to put in there for the celebrity edition?

Director Danny Draven has crafted a decidedly average horror movie, though to be fair to him it might not have been out of choice. As is often the case with micro-budget horror movies not only did Draven and his team have very limited resources but they also had very little time to actually make the film (a mere eight days), not helped by the quite cliché plot they had to work with. The film including credits barely scrapes 72 minutes so at least it didn’t overstay its welcome, but that doesn’t give the story or any of the characters room to breathe either. Betraying the film’s low budget origins, the grainy videotape look of the film is very noticeable though this does not necessarily work against the film, giving it something of the cheap TV sheen of the reality shows its aping. The cast are a functional lot who while never likely to go far beyond the Full Moon/Tempe low budget schlock we know and love and despite only having a handful of credits between them the actresses all fit into their clichés quite nicely, Max and his crew are a similarly clueless lot who really don’t make too much of an impact until it comes time for them to die, but isn’t that how we like ‘em? However a big problem is that none of the characters are especially likeable, this sort of film is better or perhaps more suspenseful if there had been someone to root for. If you’re a Brinke Stevens fan keep an eye out for her as one of the mysterious hooded spectres in a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ cameo. They were also lucky to get Joe Estevez on set for a couple of days to do a couple of segments as the network boss, he brings an assured charisma to his scenes and a fun appearance for the b-fans to enjoy.

The visuals are obviously quite limited due to budget and time constraints, but Draven does well with what he has. The idea that this is a reality TV show is expressed visually from time to time using jerky black and white footage to resemble footage from the camera’s in the girls’ headsets, and from time to time a scene will be shot from high up on a wall to look like an installed surveillance camera. Sadly there are not enough scenes like this, and this style is not explored in any great detail probably mostly to do with the lack of time Draven had to set up and film shots, eight days to film a whole movie doesn’t leave much space for experimentation. It may sound like I’m making excuses for the makers of the film but really, the idea of reality TV and the unique points of view that could be used in the filming of a movie based on them, views from various cameras installed into the walls and the like, given far more time than the makers of Hell Asylum had there was far more that could be done, but Draven did well to incorporate as much as he did considering the constraints he had upon him. The effects used when the hooded figures appear are good too, little shots of static suddenly cut into the picture, and some choice seconds of speeded up footage makes their movement look quite cool. There’s plenty of gore too of the extremely cheap ‘food products covered in strawberry desert topping kind’, and wow I never knew a human’s guts looked so much like egg noodles soaked in red food dye! We’re not talking groundbreaking stuff, or even particularly convincing stuff, but they’re still gooey fun.

Overall, this is a film that sadly underachieves due to a shallow script that does contain some amusing lines but doesn’t really go anywhere, and lack of time and funds. Not much over an hour in length the film never really gets into the swing of things before jumping to the deaths, which doesn’t allow any of the characters to move beyond their shallow stereotypes. I haven’t seen the other horror movies that poke fun at the reality TV genre so I can’t compare, but this is good schlocky fun, though no depth and no budget means it never gets beyond showing potential, but being decidedly average overall. Nice try though Danny.

If you get the special edition version of Hell Asylum direct from Tempe Entertainment’s site, which incidentally is worth the low price tag for the effort that has gone into the DVD and the extras (though is only available in a small quantity so go quick!) you’ll get an extra short film from Low-Budget Productions called Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker!.

Its goddamn awful really, showing the adventure of Mulva, an intensely irritating sugar-fuelled horror fan celebrating Halloween. She gets into all sorts of adventures with her friend Cassie involving zombies, people with bad wigs, and various other crazy people. It includes appearances from Trent Haaga, Lloyd Kaufman, and Debbie Rochon amongst others and they make things a teeny bit more watchable. Now, apart from being crap, I have a bit of a problem with a character played by the director Chris Seaver called Mr. BoneJack.

Now far be it from me to go pushing overly PC views on those independent, free thinking chaps behind this movie, but I have question the reasoning behind some white guy in blackface. Now while his character, a sort of cross between Bill Cosby and Don King, is amusing for perhaps 30 seconds, it doesn’t really distract from the fact that its still some jerk in blackface. Not cool.