For years The Asylum has been making their cult classic mockbusters that takes on the ideas of a big budget film and does their own low budget spin on it. I honestly didn’t know they were still around, but here we are with their latest The Jolly Monkey clearly taking some inspiration from The Monkey. The film stars Dominic Keaton, Jane Hajduk, Courtney Fulk, Neirin Winter and Patrick Labyorteaux but is it the usual insane twist of fun that The Asylum is known for or will it be a motel not worth staying at?

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The Jolly Monkey follows the family of the owners of the isolated Jolly Monkey motel return to discuss what to do with the place after families disappeared 40 years ago. One by one they are killed by a someone dressed as the motel's mascot and need to escape.

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With anything from The Asylum I keep my expectations low but admit to my guilty pleasure of loving their films for years. I haven’t watched one in years so was excited to see where they took this premise. I was happy that outside of the Monkey toy itself this is pretty much a completely different story and for what they are working with works on some aspects, but sadly not much of it.

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The story is simple enough, but rambles all over the place as we spend way too long just watching these people argue and fight over what they are going to do with the hotel. It gets old after a while, and you just want some killing to start. When it finally does it is pretty generic with some decent blood effects for this budget, but nothing that really stands out.

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The big reveal is kind of weak, but I was willing to go with it, but they shift in some