Snakes on a Train (2006) and My Relationship With Asylum

I’ve liked watching movies that most people would consider bad for a while now.  I’m not sure where this desire to watch them started.  What I can say is that a large part of my bad movie watching has been devoted to seeking out the films of The Asylum.  I’ve seen around fifteen of their produced films now.  I have liked some and disliked some, but I don’t want to write about that.  I want to write about my history with The Asylum and how I came to anticipate and watch their movies.

The first encounter I ever had with The Asylum was in 2006 in a movie store.  That’s right.  A brick-and-mortar movie store.  The store was across from my high school and was a source of many films for me.  I’m not sure what I was there buying at the time.  It could have been Boondock Saints, or it could have been Saving Private Ryan.  I’m not sure what I was buying.  As I browsed the shelves at the store, I stumbled upon a movie called Snakes on a Train.  I looked at the friend that I had gone there with and we both laughed.  It would be a while before I watched one of their movies, but I now knew that they existed.

Jump forward to 2011 and Battle: Los Angeles is being released.  I go to the drug store to get a bottle of shampoo and there is a movie store next to it with a poster for a movie called Battle of Los Angeles.  I think to myself “Oh, another knock-off movie cashing in on the possible success of a big budget movie.”  I don’t think about The Asylum.  That is, until later that week when I watched The Soup.  Joel McHale presented a really bad looking clip from the movie as the clip of the week.  This sparked something in me.  I had to see the movie.

My first foray into the output of The Asylum was through the movie Battle of Los Angeles.  It was everything I could have hoped.  It was cheesily bad, but it was still a fun movie when I was watching it.  Watching the movie began my obsession.  I now wanted to see as many of The Asylum’s movies as I could.  It was a craving that I needed to feed.  So I watched more movies by The Asylum.

The second movie is where it all started to come together for me, though.  I watched Titanic II at some point after seeing Battle of Los Angeles.  The basic idea of the movie is that a guy builds a new Titanic.  The maiden voyage is the same as the original Titanic, but in the opposite direction.  Disaster strikes as global warming causes a glacier to break and crash into the ship.  Then the rest of the movie is just like the story of the Titanic.  When I saw the movie, I was not at school.  I was on an eight month break from school and trying to find a way to pass time.  When I returned to school in the winter of 2012, I convinced one of my housemates to watch the movie with me.  Not only was Titanic II my second movie from The Asylum, but it was my first rewatch.  From then on, this housemate and I would make a habit of watching movies that most people find bad.  (This would also eventually spawn the Sunday “Bad” Movie blog posts after I left the school.)  We watched many Asylum movies over the course of the next four months.

The other Asylum movies that I know I watched with this housemate included Transmorphers, Transmorphers 2: Fall of Man, Air Collision, and Snakes on a Train.  Each of these movies had their strengths and weaknesses, but overall, we had a good time watching them.  Let’s talk about Snakes on a Train for a little bit, though.  It’s the movie that spawned this specific blog post.

Snakes on a Train was made in 2006 to earn money off of the success of Snakes on a Plane.  It’s about a woman who sneaks onto a train, and the snakes that come out of her and terrorize the other passengers.  There is more to it but that about sums up the important stuff.  This was the fourth Asylum movie I had seen, following Battle of Los Angeles, Titanic II, and a movie called 200 MPH.  I wasn’t a huge fan of it when I first saw it, but it wasn’t a terrible movie.  That’s why I decided to rewatch it for this marathon.  I never hated it.

On May 30^th, 2013, I rewatched Snakes on a Train.  I wasn’t watching it with anyone else in the room with me, but I was live-Tweeting it with a gentleman on Twitter named Jaime Burchardt.  I think we both enjoyed watching it.  The poor pacing, the bad acting, the terrible dialogue, and the horrendous special effects all helped to make the movie fun.  Plus, the sheer ridiculousness of the ending makes everything worth it.  It was a good time live-Tweeting it.

I’ve seen other Asylum movies between the times when I would watch them with my housemate and the time I live-Tweeted Snakes on a Train.  They range from good to bad, with a few making my bottom of the year lists.  But I still keep watching movies from The Asylum because I have a good time watching them.  For the most part.  There’s nothing worse than watching some of their bad output, like Bigfoot.  All in all, I like their stuff though, which is why I keep seeking it out.  I hope they keep making fun movies that I enjoy.  It will keep me a happy viewer.

There are a few notes that I would like to make before you go about your daily activities:

• Other Asylum movies that have been a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies are Two-Headed Shark Attack and Rise of the Zombies.
• There are also two other movies that have been made to take some of the audience from more well-known movies.  These are A Car’s Life, and Tappy Toes.
• If you have a movie that you would like to suggest for the Sunday “Bad” Movie, you can leave a comment below, or message me on Twitter.
• If you want to know about this Jaime Burchardt guy, you can talk to him on Twitter as well.