In Mockbuster, once-up-and-coming Australian filmmaker Anthony Frith documents his last-ditch push to make it in Hollywood: directing a feature for notorious mockbuster factory The Asylum. For those unfamiliar with the term, a mockbuster is an ultra-low-budget film released with a similar title and theme to whatever big-budget sci-fi, fantasy or action film is currently dominating the multiplexes. Past Asylum productions have included Snakes On a Train, Titanic II, Atlantic Rim, Road Wars: Max Fury, and literally hundreds of other titles. Recurring features in Asylum productions include off-the-shelf CGI; casts of unknowns, often with one has-been “star” that’s been booked for one day’s work; anachronistic or mismatched costumes and props; and a fascination with sharks, dinosaurs, airliners, and weather phenomena – sometimes in unlikely combinations, as in the long-running Sharknado series.
By simply emailing The Asylum and asking if they’d let him direct one of their features, Frith lands the job, and so his small documentary crew follow him to LA, where he meets the company’s key figures, gets an idea of what to expect (answer: a thankless six-day shoot and no wiggle room for adding “artistic” touches), and incidentally scores an invitation to veteran actor Eric Roberts’ house. Back in Australia, he has his assignment: a film about Australian and Russian sailors shipwrecked on a dinosaur island, The Land that Time Forgot. In fact, The Asylum have made The Land that Time Forgot already, in 2009. It’s ostensibly an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1918 novel, for when necessary The Asylum makes use of public domain titles from Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne – but really, it was originally designed to serve as a mockbuster for the 2009 film version of Land of the Lost, starring Will Ferrell. The good people at The Asylum, of course, can’t foresee which Hollywood efforts will make a lasting impact when they’re deciding to mockbust them. This time around The Land that Time Forgot, with its dinosaurs-on-an-island plot, is presumably a cash-in on Jurassic World Rebirth, a film that already felt like fanfiction of itself – curiously, however, The Asylum also put out the more obvious cash-in, Jurassic Reborn, in 2025.
Frith decidedly does not have a good time, coming up against plot holes and plain bad dialogue in the rushed script he’s been given; difficulties finding suitable locations; frustrated actors and an overworked crew; and the overbearing presence of Brendan Petrizzo, a young producer and director with over thirty Asylum credits in just under 8 years, who has been sent across from Los Angeles to oversee Frith. Still, the young Australian maintains good humour and self-deprecating irony throughout, which is presumably the quality that first drew him to The Asylum, whose head honcho Paul Bales is under no illusion about what kind of content they produce: “We make shitty movies for people with bad taste, and alcoholics […] we’re barely above porn”.
Mockbuster, then, makes for a breezily likeable, but never very insightful, look at how the sausage is made, that sausage being the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel, barely-fit-for-human-consumption sausage. It may or may not give existing Asylum fans a greater appreciation for what they do; the peek behind the scenes certainly makes Anthony Frith’s Land That Time Forgot more watchable – it’s available on Amazon Prime, for anyone who wishes to double-bill this film and that.