The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The mockbuster is a term that was coined circa 2006 to describe the films produced by the low-budget company The Asylum. The mockbuster is almost always a low-budget film designed to imitate a big-budget film and is released around the same time or soon after to capitalise on the publicity of the more high-profile film.
In the case of The Asylum, the films are made with soundalike titles designed to resemble those of their big-budget counterpart in the hopes that people scanning a list of available titles will not look too closely. The Asylum also have a popular line in conducting low-budget versions of public domain works whenever a new big-budget adaptation is announced.
While The Asylum has made this into a business model, the idea of doing so predates the coining of the term mockbuster and can be seen to be going back decades before.
A Blaxploitation copy of The Exorcist – so blatant that it was sued for copyright infringement. Worth seeing for its entertaining absurdities including the climactic exorcism held on a disco dancefloor
A halfway decent Asylum film that emerges better than the film it is ripping off, the overblown Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The film does the historical crossover aspect with some ingenuity
Another of The Asylum’s mockbusters, intended to come out the same time as M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth. This feels like a cheap planetary adventure that recycles Avatar and Planet of the Apes
A mockbuster from The Asylum that sets out to copy Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit such that Jackson and co sued, forcing The Asylum to change the title in several territories
The Asylum’s mockbuster answer to the Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow, which has very little to do with it other than both featuring an alien invasion. A film created with more ambition than budget to convey it
Luigi Cozzi directed quickie designed to copy the success of Alien. As with many Italian films of this era, it has largely been conceived around plentiful provision of gore and little else
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Prometheus where they have settled for giving us Predator as a Found Footage film (with a good few doses of Ancient Astronauts nuttinesss)
Another of The Asylum’s mockbusters in this case blatantly ripping off the then recent Marvel Comics adaptation Thor, all made with The Asylum’s typical cut-rate production values
Another of the unofficial sequels that bear slim to no resemblance to the Amityville Horror hoax. This is a cheaply made and not terribly scary British effort set in a asylum supposedly built on the site of the Amityville house
An Asylum mockbuster intended to come out at the same time as the RoboCop remake. Okay low-budget action and use of Cyberpunk tropes where the film’s saving grace is a sense of humour
An Italian-made ripoff of The Exorcist. Probably the most lavishly produced of all Exorcist ripoffs, this soon slips into lurid shock theatrics. Star Carla Gravina should get full marks for going beyond the call of duty
South Korean-made cheapie intended to ride the coattails of the 1976 remake of King Kong, this must be one of the worst films ever made with some of the most pitiful special effects ever put on film
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Godzilla vs Kong that features a giant-sized chimpanzee and gila monster facing off against one another
When Guillermo Del Toro made Pacific Rim, The Asylum conducted their own copy simply by switching US seaboards. While not exactly Oscar quality, this is one of The Asylum’s better mockbusters
When Guillermo Del Toro made Pacific Rim, The Asylum switched US seaboards to make Atlantic Rim. With the release of the Pacific Rim sequel, The Asylum followed in kind
The Asylum’s response to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Not having their own superheroes, they have ingeniously created an adventure involving various fairytale princesses – a great idea that befalls miserable execution
Released at the same time as Avengers: Infinity War, this was a mockbuster from The Asylum involving a team-up between fairytale characters. The third in their Avengers Grimm series
Roger Corman jumps aboard the Star Wars fad and offers up a version of The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven located in space. Corman has thrown a reasonable budget at the film for once and it emerges as colourfully enjoyable
The Asylum’s mockbuster take on Avatar: The Way of Water, which ingeniously exploits the fact that Saturn has a moon called Pandora. The rest is a low-budget body snatchers film
This was The Asylum’s mockbuster take on Battle Los Angeles, a rehash of alien invasion cliches but with modestly more vigour than most of their efforts
Prolific bad movie director Mark Polonia offers his own no-budget take on the Transformers films where the Transformers are two men in bulky costume who wrestle one another
The original Battlestar Galactica tv series was an incredibly blatant copy built on the success of Star Wars. This is the pilot, which aired on tv in the US but was released theatrically to theatres in other countries
This was made as a quickie cash-in on Irwin Allen’s big-budgeted bomb The Swarm. Cheap effects and ridiculous plotting cause it to topple well over into bad movie stakes
A blatant Italian copy of The Exorcist. An exploitation film made with almost zero directorial style that only has the schlock amusements of its attempts to outdo The Exorcist going for it
This has next-to-nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe. Instead, Luigi Cozzi makes a giallo thriller that makes claims to be the unofficial third chapter of Dario Argento’s at that point unfinished Three Mothers trilogy.
This blatantly copies the plot of Basic Instinct with detective David Bradley being seduced by bisexual blonde Anna Thomson who is also the suspect in a murder investigation
An unofficial copycat of the Filipino-made Blood Island from exploitation director Al Adamson, a trashy mix involving a dictator’s transplanted brain, Frankenstein monsters and a perverted dwarf
A mockbuster from The Asylum released to take advantage of Pixar’s Cars 3, this is actually a much better film that you expect it to be
This was made as a fairly blatant mockbuster copy of Jaws. This is basically Jaws on dry land with a bear instead of a shark and an assonant soundalike title Claws instead of Jaws
Bruce Lee popularised the kung fu genre but then died. Welcome to the Brucespolitation phenomenon where for several years we had Bruce lookalikes appearing in copycat works. Several Bruce imitators appear here as his clones
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of It: Chapter Two. From Eric Forsberg, one of the better directors to emerge from The Asylum, this involves a group of teens being pursued around a funhouse by a killer clown.
A low-budget mockbuster that joins the horde of ghost nun films that were made following the success of The Nun. From the director of Clowntergeist.
A mockbuster from The Asylum that was released three days before the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. While some of The Asylum’s mockbusters have their amusements, this is cheaply and indifferently made
A mockbuster copy of Death Wish that gains its novelty from the casting of Robert Kovacs, an actor who could be a dead ringer for the late Charles Bronson, who is naturally cast as a lone man with a gun cleaning up the streets of scumbags
UK’s Amicus Films had a reasonable hit with their horror anthology Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. Director/producer David L. Hewitt jumped in with a copy with a soundalike title produced on a poverty row budget
When 20th Century Fox began their Planet of the Apes reboot series, director Mark Polonia quickly jumped in with his own Z-budget mockbuster take. Several sequels followed
Film posing as a sequel in the Hong Kong-made Erotic Ghost Story series, this consists of random sexual encounters and comic interludes without much connecting plot
The Asylum’s mockbuster response to the hit of The Exorcism of Emily Rose and actually a far more interesting film. This discovers itself with a go-for-broke trashiness that the horde of Emily Rose imitators balked at
A disaster movie mockbuster from The Asylum that was intended to exploit the (non)-success of Geostorm. Directed by the writer of the Sharknado films
From the notorious 1980s heyday of Italian horror, this reads as The Amityville Horror remade as a Lucio Fulci film with the addition of a series of gore-drenched dispatches
Another entry among 2012’s spate of Snow White films following Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. this was a low-budget mockbuster copycat from The Asylum
The Asylum’s offering amid the Hercules movie revival of 2014 – The Legend of Hercules and the Dwayne Johnson-starring Hercules. Those were ridiculed, while this rises to a level of averageness
One of the early mockbusters from The Asylum about a in-bred family of cannibals that live in a cave. This was made to come out the same time as the remake of The Hills Have Eyes
An Asylum mockbuster aimed to exploit the release of the Transformers spinoff BumbleBee. This has the unique distinction of being a Transformers-type film shot as Found Footage
A mockbuster from The Asylum that was intended to capitalise on the release of I Am Legend and in fact gets much more of the essence of the original Richard Matheson novel than the official film did
The Asylum’s mockbuster answer to Independence Day: Resurgence, a rehash of Independence Day on a cheaper budget. The desire to copy the title has forced some plotting oddities onto the film
Another of The Asylum’s mockbusters intended to capitalise on the release of Jack the Giant Slayer. Despite setting out to adapt Jack and the Beanstalk, there are no giants in the film
A blatant ripoff of Carrie about a tormented girl who takes psychic revenge using snakes. Without Brian De Palma in the director’s chair, this only looks like a cheap tv movie
A mockbusters from The Asylum made to coincide with the big-budget Brendan Fraser film. Resemblance to the Jules Verne book fairly much ends at the title
This was The Asylum’s mockbuster copy of Disney’s Jungle Cruise and is a similar kind of adventure film. However, this proves far more entertaining than what you expect
The Asylum offer up their own mockbuster copy of the Jurassic World films, an amiable children’s film where a young boy hatches a dinosaur egg he finds
NOT the Guy Ritchie film but an Asylum mockbuster released at the same time. The most WTF take on the Arthurian legends ever with the Knights as gun-wielding US Marines
This has nothing to do with King Kong and is an adventure film that features a female Tarzan and a mad scientist creating an army of mind-controlled gorillas
One of several Italian exploitation copycats of Jaws. This has the reputation as the film that was such a blatant ripoff that Universal sued to stop its release
The Asylum’s response to the box-office success of The Martian. The script has only made minimal effort to research the science but this works somewhat better than their usual fare
The Asylum’s low-budget mockbuster copy of The Meg, which is an irony in that The Meg was really an Asylum killer shark film with an A-budget. Two sequels followed.
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Moonfall. This plays a ridiculous premise with an ingenious absurdity and proves far more entertaining than its bigger budgeted model
Cocaine Bear proved a reasonable success. The Asylum’s response was to give us Methgator about a drug-addicted giant alligator
One of the better mockbusters from The Asylum, timed to come out at the same time as the US Godzilla, King of the Monsters and actually far more modestly enjoyable
The Asylum offer up a mockbuster copy of Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall that is far more entertaining than the original
Low-budget film that would very much like it if we mistook it for one of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films
The Asylum’s mockbuster answer to the J.J. Abrams’ produced Overlord concerning GIs on a mission behind enemy lines encountering Nazi mad science. Passably well made for the most part
An Italian exploitation film about gangs fighting in the ruins of a future New York. Director Enzo G. Catsellari has ripped off both Escape from New York and The Warriors
The South Korean tv series Squid Games with people forced to play deadly versions of children’s games was a surprise international hit on Netflix. This is the low-budget horror copycat
With the success of the James Bond films in the 1960s, someone had the idea of casting Sean Connery’s younger brother Neil in a spy film
An Asylum mockbuster released at the same time as Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., this involves time travel mission into the prehistoric past that accidentally brings a dinosaur back to the present
A bafflingly incoherent effort – quite what it is about I am at a loss to explain. The sole distinction it has that it was repackaged from its anonymous original title to market it on the tail of Blumhouse’s Ouija: Origin of Evil despite the fact an ouija board only briefly features at the start
The Asylum’s answer to Paranormal Activity Oren Peli made his film for $15,000, which is about as cheap as it is possible to make a film; this manages to look even cheaper – simply someone wandering around with a camcorder that is at best aimed in the general direction of things happening
Patrick was a modest Australian film about a bedridden coma patient exhibiting physic powers. This is an unofficial Italian-made sequel made way back before anyone coined the term mockbuster. This has no compunctions about aiming for the completely trashy – and all the more entertainingly for it
The Asylum conduct their own version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars adventures three years before the Disney film and, despite one of their impoverished budgets, do an almost halfway reasonable version
Low-budget film that was clearly trying to ride on the coattails of Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus. This tells an almost interesting story about a timeloop and gets full marks for winding in the Greek myth of Prometheus
A spectacularly terrible film. Designed to exploit the 1976 remake, this offers up a sex-reversed parody of King Kong – only the Kong producers didn’t see that way and sued to stop the film being released. Robin Askwith, the star of the softcore Confessions films, engages in a romance with a female Kong amid excruciating puns
A mockbuster from The Asylum released to ride on the coattails of Mad Max: Fury Road. Slightly more watchable than most of their offerings, although still cheaply made, this is the oddity of a Mad Max film with the addition of vampires
From Italy, a blatant copy of Predator – only where instead of a military unit being hunted through the jungle by an alien, they are hunted by a copycat of RoboCop
The Asylum’s cheap mockbuster version of the big-budget Dwaye Johnson-starring disaster movie spectacle San Andreas. Passable as general fare from The Asylum, about the level of the average filler tv movie and with effects to a not-too-bad standard
A mockbuster take on Sherlock Holmes from The Asylum released the same time as the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Jr film. Ben Syder makes for a neurotically subdued Holmes but the film takes a leap off into demented Steampunk territory to emerge as one of The Asylum’s better offerings
An early mockbuster from The Asylum that came out the same day as The Omen remake, this conducts a blatant copy of The Omen on a low-budget
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
The first of The Asylum’s mockbusters intended as a soundalike copy of Snakes on a Plane, this ends up defeated by low-budget and one of the most absurd premises of any film in recent memory
An early mockbuster from The Asylum, a copy of 2007’s crocodile amok films with a giant 100-foot-long crocodile heading towards Los Angeles
A cheap Spanish-made copy of the first Christopher Reeve Superman film
Softcore version of Thir13en Ghosts with ghosts hunters wandering through a house and seeing various girls making out. The various encounters seem to lack even the basic conviction from those involved
A low-budget mockbuster from The Asylum designed to jump aboard the bandwagon of Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder
The Asylum’s mockbuster response to the theatrical reboot of Tomb Raider. This is cut-priced and features globe-spanning adventures that never travel outside of California
The Asylum’s answer to Michael Bay’s Transformers. Bay had a $150 million budget; they try to copy it for $250,000. To its credit, the film flies valiantly to deliver a watchable show in the face of inadequate effects
Transmorphers was The Asylum’s mockbuster copy of Michael Bay’s Transformers and one of their better films. When Bay released his sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Asylum also made this prequel
A mockbuster from The Asylum that was designed to capitalise on the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, this is a low-budget CGI dinosaur film that is slightly better than most
Acclaimed as one of the worst films ever made, this has a legendary bizarreness that has made it a cult film, everything from the ridiculousness of its dialogue and effects to the cast that seems made up of unskilled amateurs
A strong contender for Worst Film Ever. Rather than create any effects, it has simply uplifted footage from Star Wars, while the score is a mismash taken from popular films of the era. The dialogue is so bizarrely surreal it makes the brain hurt trying to understand it
Where the legend of The Asylum and their low-budget mockbusters began, this was a cheap modernised version of the H.G. Wells novel that was released a day before the Spielberg film. Despite cheap effects, this adheres closer to Wells than Spielberg did and is better written than most Asylum product
A blatant copy of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs even down to the near-identical title and a similar plot about crop circles appearing on a farm presaging an alien invasion
One of The Asylum’s first mockbusters, designed to popularise on the remake of When a Stranger Calls
A blatant Bollywood copy of Oldboy, often scene-for-scene
Italian film conceived as a quickie copy of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with the focus on gore scenes. This made the name of cult Italian splatter director Luci Fulci.