Mockbuster Review – How to Survive the Nightmare of Directing a Terrible, Low-Budget Horror Film | film

‘A “Better a bad movie than no movie” is the tagline for this behind-the-scenes documentary, which charts director Anthony Frith’s quest to make his first feature film at the ultra-modern studio The Asylum; It’s also a nice tribute to the skill of filmmaking.

Stuck producing corporate videos to support his young family, Adelaide-based Freeth is in danger of letting his artistic ambitions fade away. So he chose professional shock therapy by cold-calling The Asylum (of Sharknado notoriety) in Burbank, California and suggested he supervise a live digital cesspit feature.

It turns out that if The Asylum were a genre, it would be the story of a suicide mission against all odds. Frith was given six days to complete filming on the remake of The Land That Time Forgot, which would be the first film to be shot at a studio in Australia. The budget is subatomic, and there is no final script when he signs the contract and is told, just days before filming, to secure his production team. Relying on this extreme frugality to ensure profit margins, The Asylum’s executives laugh at their managers with an almost sadistic love. They say that Frith might have succeeded in passing this stage, if he had not tried to become an “artist.”

Any such notions quickly go out the window. Confronted with the timeline from hell, Freeth turns to survival advice from veterans of The Asylum, such as actor Eric Roberts, and low-budget researchers including horror boy extravaganza Danny Filippo, who quips that Freeth seems broken before he even starts. On the executive side, there’s something almost refreshing in the cynicism deployed by The Asylum — the studio’s creed is that the majority of viewers have no patience for technical complexities, so why should filmmakers? As Los Angeles’ film ecosystem dries up, these surviving cockroaches may be the last group standing; Motion picture service in its most reactionary form, where “genre is the star.”

Freeth can be blunt, too: encouraged by Brendan Petrizzo, a slightly unsettling in-house producer with frigid limbs, and the director reflects that he may have found his natural form. Maybe…or maybe not. Supposedly severely harassed by his disastrous film shoot, he sometimes struggles to break down his experience into highly analysable parts in this documentary, relying on voiceover to tell the story. But ironically, he succeeded in making a very good film. A companionable reflection on artistic aspirations, compromise and on-set camaraderie, all – true to the spirit of The Asylum – in 90 uninterrupted minutes.