EVIL NUN and the Ultimate Sin

EVIL NUN (DVD)

2025 / 90 min

The Asylum

Review by Josey, the Sudden Cat🙀

For a fleeting moment, Evil Nun got my hopes up with its genuinely disturbing prologue, which has a nun crouched on a church floor, screaming in blood-curdling agony while in labor. After she gives birth, a dark-robed figure takes her baby away, then brains her with a hammer. It’s a scene more unnerving than anything in The Nun, the inexplicably popular film that mockbuster masters The Asylum are obviously ripping off.

Then the moment’s over, and the story itself starts with yet-another carload of young people who get stranded. And I gotta say…few things kill my enthusiasm for a horror movie faster than one that opens with a batch o’ kids stuck in the middle of nowhere. It’s one of the most overused horror tropes in history and the kids are always the same, which is indicative of a complete indifference to offering anything original. 

When all else fails, shine the flashlight directly at your own face.

But I get it. Originality has never been The Asylum’s modus operandi, so why start now? And admittedly, they’ve managed to crank out a few that are genuinely entertaining (if sometimes at their own expense). Not this time, however. The plot eventually has its characters trapped in the same church where the nun from the prologue died. Then they start getting picked off by an unseen entity…but not the nun herself, who instead “possesses” one of the girls, imploring her and her dwindling group of friends to find her missing baby. 

That’s right, kids…despite the misleading title, there is no evil nun (unless you count her being knocked up in the first place). But that’s the least of the movie’s problems. While performances are serviceable, a few of the kills are okay and the film is competently made, the story and characters are hopelessly generic. Since it doesn’t even qualify as so-bad-it’s-good, Evil Nun ends up committing the ultimate sin of being boring and forgettable.

THE JOLLY MONKEY: What Else Would You Expect From The Asylum?

THE JOLLY MONKEY (DVD)

2025 / 93 min

The Asylum

Review by Josey, the Sudden Cat🙀

Those lovable lunatics at The Asylum are back at it. Being the undisputed kings of the “mockbuster,” taking time to review damn near any of their movies is almost an exercise in redundancy. People either hate them because they’re barely disguised rip-offs, or love them because they’re barely disguised rip-offs.

This time we’re getting The Jolly Monkey, it’s title and cover art obviously created to evoke Osgood Perkin’s recent Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey. Comparing the two is, of course, pointless, but not just in terms of overall quality. It’s already a given that it’s gonna be cheaper, cheesier and cast with actors who don’t even warrant their own Wikipedia page (nor does the movie, for that matter).

But plotwise, The Jolly Monkey kinda goes in a different direction. It’s more of a slasher movie about two sisters and their families inheriting a dilapidated old motel once owned by their parents. While bickering over whether to sell the property or restore it, they’re being killed-off one by one by a murderer in a monkey costume, who also slices off their faces.

"What's the problem? You said dress formal."

The story also clumsily throws in supernatural elements related to all the beat-up old toy monkeys laying around the place. Additionally, it turns out the family has a dark past, especially the sisters’ dad, who was both a hide-tanning expert and serial killer in his spare time. As for who’s knocking everybody off this time around, viewers will have no trouble figuring it out the killer's identity because there’s no such thing as subtlety in their performance. But at least it is a performance, which can’t really be said about the rest of the cast.

Because of the mostly serious tone, silly dialogue, dumb characters and a villain that elicits more chuckles than scares, The Jolly Monkey is more of an unintentional comedy than a horror film (though a couple of death scenes are pretty good). But with The Asylum pulling the strings (including the purse strings), that shouldn’t come as a surprise…or a disappointment, either.