Synopsis: A struggling filmmaker’s opportunity collides with chaos and compromise when Sharknado’s notorious studio, The Asylum, invites him to direct a “mockbuster.”
Stars: Anthony Frith, Brendan Petrizzo, David Michael Latt, Michelle Bauer, Bix Krieger, Paul Bales, David Rimawi, David Margetts, Sev Philippou, Aaron Schuppan, Michael Paré
Director: Anthony Frith
Rated: NR
Running Length: 90 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: The Asylum has never lost a dime, and Anthony Frith’s letter-writing gamble to direct one of their dinosaur pictures shows you exactly why. Mockbuster is funnier, sadder, and far more honest than the movie it’s about.
Mockbuster Review: Never Lost a Dime
The Asylum has never lost money on a movie. Not once, not across more than 500 titles, which is a claim Pixar can’t make and Marvel can’t either. The Burbank studio behind Sharknado and Snakes on a Train built the whole operation on spending a little less than it knows it can earn, and it has outlasted very nearly everybody who ever laughed at it. Hollywood’s most reliably profitable studio is the one nobody will admit to respecting, and that contradiction is the engine humming under Anthony Frith’s documentary.
Frith was a promising filmmaker whose career had flattened into corporate video work, so the new father did the thing you’re told never works. He wrote a letter. Not a pitch for a particular movie, just a note to The Asylum asking for a shot at directing something, anything. Guess what? They wrote back.
Then they assigned him The Land That Time Forgot, a lost-world dinosaur picture he had nothing to do with choosing, along with six days to shoot it, a budget best described as aspirational, and sets built in suburban Adelaide parking lots. He filmed the entire ordeal while directing it, and that footage is Mockbuster.
Inside the Cottage Industry of the Quick Buck
Frith makes a great documentary subject partly because he’s such a poor fit for the job. He’s affable, sincere about craft, and allergic to conflict. He flies to Los Angeles, sits with the studio heads, casts his picture, and heads home to Australia before the math catches up with him.
Asylum co-founders David Latt, David Rimawi, and producer Paul Bales appear throughout, and not one of them plays villain. They’re candid businessmen running a legal, honest hustle, and they’ll walk you through exactly how the sausage gets made. There’s no exposé here because there’s nothing to expose, and that turns out to be the better story anyway.
The film’s sharpest stretch is also its most uncomfortable. An actor and the cinematographer clash on set, loudly, and Frith hovers at the edge of the frame weighing whether stepping in is his job. Even though he’s the director, he’s still scanning the room for a grown-up. A director waiting for somebody with more authority to walk onto his own set sums up the entire movie in a single shot.
Rubber Dinosaurs, Real Deadlines
Cinematographer Maxx Corkindale shoots the chaos plainly and lets the seams show, which is the right instinct. Composer Bryony Marks scores it lightly and never once mocks the people or process onscreen. Editor David Scarborough cuts at a clip that mirrors the shoot itself, ten or twelve pages a day, no time to admire anything.
Nothing about the craft is fancy, and nothing needs to be. The pleasure is watching competent people solve unreasonable problems against a clock that never stops. The filmmaking for both movie and documentary is guerrilla in nature, especially when it comes to faking a jungle setting.
The Friends Who Got Out
Frith’s access is the film’s ace and also its built-in limit. He talks with Eric Roberts, treated here as a genuine coup, which tells you plenty about the neighborhood we’re visiting. For directing advice, he sits with fellow Australian Danny Philippou, who, with twin brother Michael, broke out of the small time on Talk to Me and followed it with Bring Her Back. He also gets time with Rachel Lee Goldenberg, who started at The Asylum and parlayed it into the very fun Valley Girl remake and Unpregnant.
Every one of them found their way to stardom (or, in Roberts case, maintained their position) via low-budget filmmaking. None of them can explain how in a way Frith could actually follow, and the pattern that emerges looks less like talent than like timing. The film is honest enough to let that sit there without resolving it.
Where the Circus Tent Meets the Parking Lot
Mockbuster will play beautifully for anybody who likes going behind the circus tent, for Asylum devotees who own all six Sharknado pictures, and for anyone who’s ever pitched above their pay grade and been told yes. Frith earns your goodwill in the first ten minutes and never spends it. You want him to get the blockbuster. You want the parking lot to turn into a backlot.
One catch, and it’s a real one. I finished this with zero appetite for The Land That Time Forgot, because the documentary shows you enough of the finished film to answer any curiosity you might have had. This is a documentary that accidentally reviews the movie it was made alongside, and the verdict is not kind.
Frith went looking for a funny behind-the-scenes lark and came home with something more honest: a portrait of what it costs to find out whether you’ve still got it. The Asylum got its dinosaur picture on schedule and under budget, and true to form, it won’t lose a dime. Frith walked away with the only movie of the two worth watching.
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