I went into Mockbuster expecting to laugh in a studio. What I came away with was the fact that I spent years making movie jokes without once thinking about the person who had fifteen minutes to shoot a seven-page scene.
That’s the thing about Anthony Frith’s documentary, and it works because he never lectures. Frith, an Australian filmmaker whose career had stalled, far from his dream, asks The Asylum if he can make something for them. They say yes. The Mission is a lost-world dinosaur film called The Land That Time Forgot, which will be shot in suburban Adelaide, over six days, on a budget the film treats as its own joke. Frith points a second camera at him as he does so, and the result is a documentary about ambition colliding with a production model that doesn’t care about your ambition.
The Asylum needs no introduction to anyone who has scrolled through a streaming app after midnight. Sharknado, a catalog of titles designed to accompany whatever the multiplex opens that month, renowned for being the place where cinema goes to be photocopied. That reputation is what Mockbuster really cares about, and it turns out to be considerably more complicated than the punchline suggests.
The comedy is real and it’s not cruel
The film is really funny. Most of the humor comes from the collision between what a film needs and what six days will deliver. Executives post notes from Los Angeles while Adelaide sleeps. Demands are coming that would be reasonable at ten times the money. A team invents solutions with whatever is physically in the room. Frith maintains the composure of a man who has decided that visible panic would only make things worse.
None of this is directed downward. No one on set is the joke. The comedy comes from recognition, from the specific horror of seeing daylight disappear while a scene isn’t shot, and Frith is still the most ridiculous person in his own movie. He earns this by refusing to protect himself during editing.
Where do the seams come from?
Here’s what Mockbuster gave me that I didn’t have before. The public only encounters the finished object. We see the effect that doesn’t convince, the location that’s obviously a compromise, the performance that never got a second pass, and we blame whoever is closest to the camera. This documentary presents the chain of decisions behind these seams.
Frith is blunt about the position of the line. When asked where compromise ends and failure begins, he told me that in an Asylum film, “a lot of the compromise is the work.” Failure is not a scene of weakness. Failure is a scene that does not exist.
He gave a concrete example and it stuck with me. “There was one scene, it was like a seven page scene or something. We had about 15 minutes to shoot it, and we just had to shoot it in one take, and that was it. And it ended up, it’s in the movie.” The alternative was to lose the scene completely and inherit the debt when it was already twenty-five pages long. So it went in, in one take, and it remains in the finished film where some viewers will consider it sloppy.
That doesn’t make the scene good. Mockbuster pays attention to this and so do I. What he does is shift the question. The weakness was not indifference. It was arithmetic.
Asylum, complicated
The simple version of this review would treat The Asylum as a villain or a misunderstood genius. The documentary covers both, as did the people I spoke to.
Brendan Petrizzo, the producer who came to Adelaide to keep the film alive, pushed back against speculation the studio was being reckless. He pointed out that the documentary itself addresses the accusation of “oh, they don’t care, they just throw it out there,” and countered with something more helpful: “It’s like going to boot camp.” It’s like a complete training camp for making a film. » This does not constitute a defense of all the titles in the catalog. It’s a description of a ruthlessly efficient system for producing a finished film on time, which is more than many better-funded companies manage.
Petrizzo was also candid about what the association will cost afterward. He described being told, on projects elsewhere, “you know it’s not a movie about asylum” and responding, “well, we’re not making a movie about asylum.” This exchange says a lot about how film culture classifies people. The work is real, skills transfer and stigma ensue anyway.
Frith arrived at a similar location from the other direction. He acknowledged that the studio does what it does for profit, then added that “there’s some kind of artistry behind it. Like, they have a vision.” The tension doesn’t dissipate, and the documentary is best left open-ended. Asylum is not a secret utopia. This is a company with a clear model, made up of people who know exactly what they’re building and are exceptionally good at building it quickly.
The part that got me
The Team is where Mockbuster stops being a comedy about chaos and becomes something warmer. They are technicians and performers solving impossible problems in real time, and the film keeps them in the frame as people rather than as evidence. A production becomes a temporary community, and it is visibly united by competence and stubbornness.
Frith’s bow is the quietest. He’s not fighting a bad guy. He’s negotiating with his own expectations, and the dramatic question shifts from whether he can do something great to whether he can complete it, protect the people who work for him, and keep some of what he wanted.
What surprised me was where that left him. He expected the completion to satisfy something. “I’m more desperate to make more films now than before,” he said. “I always thought I’d do one and I’d be happy, I’d be content. But now it’s like, no, I have to keep doing things.” It’s the emotional center of the film, and it’s not triumphant. It’s the sound of someone discovering that the dream doesn’t end.
What has really changed
My standards haven’t changed. I will always call a film lazy when it is lazy, and there are many cynical, careless, dismissive films that deserve everything they get.
What moved is the target. It’s much harder today to look at a visible failure and assume it belongs to the person on screen or the team member improvising a solution. Sometimes failure was written into the schedule before anyone arrived. Criticism that ignores this is no harsher. It’s just less precise.
Mockbuster doesn’t ask for forgiveness. This requires a better class of attention. Cheap movies don’t fall from the sky, and almost no one made one expecting to fail.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Mockbuster is now available digitally in the United States and Canada from Giant Pictures.
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