Mockbuster review – how to survive the nightmare of directing a terrible low-budget horror film
Struggling to make it in Australia, aspiring director Anthony Frith cold-calls the team behind Sharknado and bites off more than he can chew in this making-of documentary
‘A bad movie is better than no movie” is the motto of this behind-the-scenes documentary, which charts director Anthony Frith’s quest to make his debut feature for ultra-schlock studio The Asylum; it doubles up as an affable salute to film-making savoir-faire.
Stuck making corporate videos to support his young family, Adelaide-based Frith is in danger of letting his artistic ambitions atrophy. So he opts for career shock therapy by cold-calling The Asylum (of Sharknado notoriety) in Burbank, California and proposing he oversee one of their straight-to-the-digital-cesspit features.
It turns out that if working for The Asylum were a film genre, it would be the against-all-odds suicide mission type of story. Frith is given six days to complete filming on a new version of The Land That Time Forgot, which will be the studio’s first movie shot in Australia. The budget is subatomic, there is no finished script when he signs the contract and he is told, only days before the shoot, to secure his own production team. Relying on this extreme frugality to ensure their profit margins, The Asylum executives laughingly dote on their directors with quasi-sadistic fondness. Frith might just make it through this, they say – if he doesn’t try to get “artistic”.
Any such notions quickly go out the window. Facing the schedule from hell, Frith canvasses survival advice from The Asylum veterans, such as actor Eric Roberts, and low-budget grafters including horror wonderkid Danny Philippou, who scoffs that Frith looks broken before he’s begun. On the executive side, there’s something almost refreshing in The Asylum’s cynicism – the studio’s credo is that the majority of viewers have no patience for arthouse complexity, so why should film-makers? As the LA movie ecosystem dries up, these survivalist cockroaches may well be the last outfit standing; movie-biz expediency in its most atavistic form, where “the genre is the star”.
Frith can be candid too: chivvied through by Brendan Petrizzo, a faintly unsettling in-house producer with a frosted fringe, the director reflects that he may have found his natural level. Maybe … or maybe not. Presumably too harassed by shooting his disasterpiece, he sometimes struggles to break down his experience into dramatically parsable portions for this making-of documentary, leaning on voiceover to tell the story. But, ironically, he succeeds in making quite a good film; a companionable reflection on artistic aspirations, compromise and on-set camaraderie, all – true to The Asylum’s spirit – in a solid 90 minutes.
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