How do you make an action adventure movie that offers almost nothing by way of action and is completely devoid of any sense of adventure? The Asylum found a way.

The movie is ALLAN QUARTERMAIN AND THE TEMPLE OF SKULLS, The Asylum's INDIANA JONES AND THE KINDGOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL mockbuster that got its start as a straight-up adaptation of KING SOLOMON'S MINES until Asylum head David Michael Latt decided original screenwriter Matthew Thornbury's script wasn't "A-list enough" and rewrote the whole thing himself and transformed it into a static tale devoid of everything one watches a movie like this for. I know this little behind the scenes tidbit because Thornbury emailed me a short while back after stumbling upon a blog posting I did regarding The Asylum. As Thornbury told me, it's difficult to write a script when you're being told to "keep it as close to the book as possible" and at the same time getting notes from the boss telling you to change this, this, this, this, and this, such as being told to "change the lion into a griffin that is the guardian of the mountains". And then, after writing multiple drafts, Latt decided to do his own page one rewrite and churned out a script that owed very little to the source material. Thornbury isn't with The Asylum anymore and doesn't bode them any ill will, but, like several other ex-Asylum employees I been in communiqué with, they wish David Michael Latt would realize that his constant meddling in the creative process is not to his movies' benefit. It damn sure didn't prove to be a good thing in the case of ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE TEMPLE OF SKULLS.

"We need to make it action-packed" was another of Latt's notes. Given the movie I just watched I can only assume that either this was sarcasm on Latt’s part or he simply does not comprehend the definition of "action-packed". The action within the first hour consisted of a very brief foot chase, a brief shootout, and a scene where the good guys escape aboard a very slow-moving train while the bad guy in an equally slow-moving car gives chase. Not even laughably bad, that train chase was just embarrassing to watch. About the only action during the last half hour will be a brief scuffle between dueling adventurers at the very end. This is the extent of the film's action - few, far between, and not worth the wait. I fully realize The Asylum's low budgets limit what they can do but this was simply pathetic.

I kind of suspected this film was going to be a boring and uneventful when it began with a six-minute pre-title sequence in which absolutely nothing of interest happened and what little did happen shouldn't have taken longer than a minute or two to play out. The pace did not pick-up from there.

I will say that the film's crisp photography and lush yet low rent visuals mixed with the obvious cheap attempts at generating a look of period authenticity populated by actors mostly better when they're not heard gave the whole production the veneer of a higher end History Channel reenactment segment, the sort of thing a narrator should have been talking over while actors play out a small chunk of the bigger picture being explained in order to give viewers at home a visual guide to work with. The Asylum are quite proud of the fact that they filmed this one on location in South Africa and even got actual Zulu tribesmen to participate. So what? They shot most of their CLOVERFIELD knock-off, MONSTER, in Japan and look how well that turned out (REVIEW HERE). Just like MONSTER, both films have positively nothing going on.

Enter H.R. Haggard's legendary adventurer Allan Quatermain - looking more Crocodile Dundee than Indiana Jones - as he prepares for a another treasure hunting adventure. Is he doing it for the history? No. Is he doing it for the thrills? No. Is he doing it for the fame? No. Is he doing it for the fortune? Yes. To be more specific, he gets a telegram informing him his son will be booted out of school unless they get paid the 10,000 pounds they're due. ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE TEMPLE OF SKULLS: the tale of the lengths one kid's father will go to just to pay his son's private school tuition.

To be perfectly honest with you, I can barely recall what passed for a plot. I know it involved Allan Quatermain teaming up with a pretty woman and a young guy in possession of a map said to reveal the location of King Solomon's mines and its lost treasure while being pursued by an unscrupulous rival treasure hunter with a menacingly expressive face worthy of a Scooby Doo villain. Their journey nature walk will involve an unfathomable amount of droning exposition and all the hiking you can stand. Eventually they'll be captured by an African tribe and then find an ancient mountainside temple that's loaded with treasure matte paintings. Quatermain and his rival will have a fist fight amid an earthquake digital effect. Before any of them had reached the temple I'd already reached for the remote.

Imagine my disappointment that the "griffin that is a guardian of the mountain" didn't make the final cut of Latt's "A-list enough" script. But we do get a really intense scene where stock footage of a rhino stares at them and then... Well, it walks away and nothing comes of it. The most imaginative element of this unimaginative bore was a glove a tribesman used that looked a bit like Freddy Kruger's glove if Freddy Kruger was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. When applied to a victim's forehead Von Erich Iron Claw-style, it somehow allowed the wearer to rip that person's skull clean out with little effort. Hey, at least that was something to momentarily break-up the deadly dull monotony of all the endless walking, talking, and not doing anything at all exciting.

At this point one has to wonder if the problem is intentional sabotage or gross incompetence on David Latt’s part. I'm going to assume he does not set out to sabotage his own films which must mean gross incompetence is the root cause of most of The Asylum's quality control woes. Here's a novel idea for Mr. Latt: how about you actually show some faith in your writers and, you know, actually let them do what you hired them for. They may not pen any instant classics, what they write may not be "A-list enough" for everyone's tastes, but I'm willing to bet at this point that whatever they come up with will be better than what you come up with because judging by ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE TEMPLE OF SKULLS you're not coming up with anything. It's like you're this entertainment succubus who sets out to suck the entertainment value out of your own films.

It's reached the point now where it's not just snarky online critics like me who are taking notice that the Asylum's brand name is synonymous with cheap, boring, and all-around crappy knock-offs. The middle-aged clerk at Blockbuster who checked me out, the moment he saw The Asylum logo on the back of the DVD case, he let out a groan and actually felt compelled to give me a warning. He started talking about how cheap and awful Asylum movies are, specifically singling out THE DA VINCI TREASURE and ALIEN VS. HUNTER as being particularly terrible ones he’d watched.

That clerk then screwed something up when ringing up my rental that led to me getting to rent ALLAN QUARTERMAIN AND THE TEMPLE OF SKULLS for nothing. Can't say I didn't get what I paid for.