The Asylum's Almighty Thor

Honestly, Almighty Thor wasn't high on my list of Richard Grieco movies to watch. I'm not a big fan of sci fi, mythology or knock-off movies and Grieco has been in so many films that there are several I haven't seen that interest me more.  Fish Don't Blink, for example.  And I assumed (correctly) that Richard wouldn't be at his most attractive as a deteriorating demon god.

But my options on Amazon streaming video were limited the trailer was kind of interesting, so I decided to go ahead and give it a shot. 




Honestly, the movie wasn't great: I had a hard time taking Cody Deal seriously as Thor, even before he pulled out the semi-automatic weapon.  I'm not sure whether it's a positive or negative to say that I had far less trouble taking Richard Grieco seriously as a demon god with giant, lizard-like beasts for pets.

All in all, I found the movie relatively entertaining, though I was sometimes unsure whether the things that were making me laugh had been intended to do so.  If you're a Grieco fan and haven't seen it, it's worth watching.  (If you do and you come away with an understanding of why he starts the movie looking pretty much like himself and is as white as The Joker by the end, please come back and share.)

While determining whether or not to watch this movie, I also learned some very interesting things about The Asylum, which is also behind Richard's upcoming AE: Apocalypse Earth.  The fact that both of these movies appeared to be created specifically to capture an audience created by a closely-related box office film initially put me off, but the more I learned the more interesting their business model became.

Apparently these knock-offs, often referred to as "mockbusters," are all The Asylum does.  And, that was apparently a conscious decision and one that's paid off. Sure, they get sued from time to time.  Yes, they may have had to change a name here and there or been restrained from releasing a movie for a while.  But from what I've read, it appears that the company has never lost money on one of these relatively low-budget movies. 

The more I learned, the more I shifted from thinking of The Asylum as a company that makes crappy rip-off movies to thinking of it as a company that knows exactly what it's doing, has accepted that it's not a blockbuster sort of operation and is having fun and making money doing its own thing.  Which, from where I'm sitting, looks like a pretty good fit for the guy who put on 40 pounds to mock himself in A Night at the Roxbury.