Asylum

  Asylum - or, to give it its full name, Asylum: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales, is a fairly dismal indie anthology film that features nine - count 'em, nine tales of very varying quality, plus a framing device in which a clown (Raymond E. Lee) delivers some painfully unfunny, grade-schooler level misanthropic (and misogynist, but that fits the character) invective at us that might or might not be related to the stories he's presenting.
 The shorts were sourced from all over the world by two Argentine producers (Nicolás Onnetti and Michael Kraetzer, and their attempts to tie everything together with their wraparound segments are a large part of why I'm overall negative on the film.

 There are two bright spots - One is Damien LeVeck's The Cleansing Hour, which presents a fake exorcist (Sam Jaeger) who runs into the real deal during a stream. If that sounds familiar, it's because Leveck managed to expand it into a (much better) feature a few years later.

 The other one is an extremely silly and gory surrealistic comedy by Caye Casas, who would almost a decade later later make The Coffee Table. It's the tale of a terminally ill henpecked man (Josep Maria Riera) who gets better just before the funeral, to the chagrin of his wife and his mother (Itziar Castro and Carme Sansa). It's camp as hell, and pretty fun.

 Other than that, a cheeky Mexican short takes the piss out of Trump's "let's build a wall on the border and make the Mexicans pay for it!" still unfulfilled campaign promise, complete with tiny crotch-mounted missile launcher half a decade before South Park made news making fun of the orange pussy-grabber's micropenis. It's a rauchy four-minute live-action (and CGI) cartoon that goes by mamón - that is, cocksucker. Guess who that's aimed at? It's a sentiment I'm sure a lot more people share these days.
 Besides that gleefully juvenile aside, there's not one, but two pretty cute zombie tales - one claymation, one live action. All these are decent enough.

 But then... there's the rest. The wraparound gets even unfunnier the longer it drags on, and seems to take great pride in going absolutely nowhere interesting. As for the other shorts... there's an incredibly basic slasher tale where all the effort is come up is spent making designing a 'cool' slasher, and next to no thought is given the incredibly basic story they put him in (that the killer looks like a slipknot robot... doesn't help things). There's a ripoff of the trippy fourth dimension flight part of 2001, and the butt-ugly 'epic' thematic conclusion to the wraparound where a bunch of clowns run amok in a fairground killing young people.

 There's some good stuff to be found here, but with the Cleansing Hour living on as its own thing, the bad sadly balances it out completely. I wouldn't really recommend this bloated mess to anyone except horror anthology completists.