For the entire month of April, Cinefessions will once again be locked inside The Asylum, reviewing tons of releases by the famed studio. Every weekday throughout April you will get another Asylum review. April’s podcast will also be devoted to films from The Asylum.
Title: 12/12/12 (2012)
Director: Jared Cohn
Runtime: 86 minutes
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I only watched 12/12/12 because I saw Ashe had watched the sequel, 13/13/13, without seeing this or 11/11/11 first, and it sounded like they were connected by name, but nothing else. This felt like a stand alone film with no need to know about anything from 11/11/11.
Baby Sebastian is born on 12/12/12, and he’s basically a demon baby. He kills the doctor and nurse during his birth and goes on a killing spree ala Chucky. He even kills the delivery boy because he tells a friend on the phone that it was the ugliest child ever. The film honestly goes nowhere, there’s a cult, and then the baby just kind of ends up in places and people die in hysterical ways.
The acting is rather bad all around, below my standards of an Asylum film. However, the film opens with sexy looking, bound woman with big bouncing boobs and blood all over them. Oh, and as a parting gift, we get to see the main actress, Sara Malakul Lane (from Jailbait), topless in the film’s finale, if you make it that long.
There’s not a lot of CGI here which I guess is a plus, but, man, that baby is in the same league as the American Sniper baby. The blood and gore is fairly basic, but there’s plenty of both.
Oddly enough this is from director Jared Cohn who has done a number of Asylum films like Hold Your Breath, and their most recent mockbuster, Bound. I don’t know what happened here because this film is a hot mess. Weird editing decisions, and an incoherent plot due to events just kind of happening for no reason.
12/12/12 might be watchable without seeing the first film, however it’s nearly unwatchable for what it is. By Asylum standards, this is one of the worst I’ve seen, which continues this mixed bag of a second visit into their catalog. Hopefully Ashe enjoyed 13/13/13 enough to watch 11/11/11 as well to complete the series, because I won’t be touching that one
Chris was raised on horror films, which gave him a deep love for the genre, especially its most quirky and offbeat titles (like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2). This love quickly turned into an obsession for cinema in 1997, when he decided he needed to see every major theatrical release. Video games (JRPGs), reading (anything but fantasy), and reality television (Survivor) are just some of his other passions. He’s been with Cinefessions since 2013, and has been writing reviews all over the internet for the past twelve years.
