The Asylum is quickly becoming the next Full Moon by bringing us a whole slew of genre friendly B-movies that take a basic idea, add in a cool sounding title, and have eye catching DVD artwork. While this is a good thing for us fans of low-budget horror cinema simply because it's great to see a studio keeping the true meaning of "B-movie" alive, like a lot of Full Moon's efforts the movies coming from The Asylum are strictly hit-or-miss. Legion Of The Dead is one of those misses.

Not to be confused with Olaf Ittenbach's horrid 2000 movie of the same name, this starts off decently when two dirt bikers accidentally stumble upon an Egyptian tomb and are eliminated in fairly bloody ways (one gets a spike through the bottom of the mouth, the other's head is crushed with a huge rock). From there we're introduced to university student Courtney Clonch who joins teacher Zach Galligan (Gremlins) at the site in order to unearth the secrets behind it. However, soon they've accidentally unleashed Egyptian priestess Claudia Lynx (who wins the award for the hottest resurrected mummy in horror film history) who proceeds to collect souls in order to bring an army of mummies to Earth.

Speaking of "army of mummies", the promise of hordes upon hordes of them given to us from the DVD box rings quite false as about four of them show-up in the finale to do some mild carnage. I'm thinking it'd be pretty hard to take over little more than a backwater town with only four mummies at your disposal. But at least we can be amused when one of them gets pinned to a fence with the pole from a pool cleaning net...

Legion Of The Dead is full of empty promises like the DVD box. From the opening scene we can only assume there's going to be a lot of bloody mayhem on hand and while there's a few scenes of low-grade gore (like the fairly weak "face melt" moments) it doesn't deliver much in that department. The box also top-bills Galligan and Bruce Boxleitner and after watching the movie it's quite obvious it was only done for name recognition as both of these fairly well-known character actors are wasted in side roles. Throw into the mix the fact that the finale is poorly staged with bad fight choreography and cornball effects and you can pretty much skip the entire thing.

If you lower your expectations you might get some very mild enjoyment from Legion Of The Dead, it's not that good and the acting is pretty so-so (Asylum regular Rhett Giles is completely over-the-top even getting to shave his head bald in the final third which only makes him resemble Arnold Vosloo from the recent Mummy series), but at least Lynx strolls around most of the movie in the nude - at least we've got that.

Visit The Asylum for more info. (Chris Hartley, 8/7/05)

Directed By: Paul Bales.
Written By: Paul Bales.

Starring: Claudia Lynx, Courtney Clonch, Rhett Giles, Chad Collins.

aka: Unravelled.

Picture Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: As with most Asylum releases the picture here is fairly solid, if not perfect. There's decent clarity but it suffers from having some grain scattered throughout and early on there's a moment where the DVD goes completely pixelated and freezes (which has happened on past Asylum discs, most notably Alien Abduction).

Extras: There's a trailer (plus trailers for H.G. Wells' War Of The Worlds, Frankenstein, Hide And Creep, and Jolly Roger), an okay "making of" featurette; and a fairly interesting commentary (that seems off-synch a few times) with director/writer Bales, actors Clonch and Giles, and co-editor Bill Shaffer.