Hollywood vs The Asylum

Titanic Vs Titanic 2

The Hit: James Cameron's multi-Oscar winner about the RMS Titanic's maiden voyage in the year 1912, before an ill-fated meeting with an iceberg.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's forthcoming straight-to-DVD cheapie about the Titanic 2's maiden voyage in the year 2012, before an ill-fated meeting with a tidal wave.

Reasons to Mock: C'mon, a joke's a joke, but isn't this, y'know, in bad taste?

Hyped as poverty row studio The Asylum's ultimate 'mockbuster,' (its cheap 'n' cheerful cash-ins on Hollywood hits), this hasn't even had the decency to properly rip off Titanic , being a much closer fit to The Poseidon Adventure .

Then Again: Shane (grandson of Dick) Van Dyke writes, directs and stars, which is more than Cameron ever did. Plus, it's half the length of the Oscar-hogger, and there's no Celine Dion.

War of the Worlds vs H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds

The Hit: Steven Spielberg's Americanised take on the Wells sci-fi classic, in which Tom Cruise has to take his moppets cross-country to escape Martian invasion.

Not To Be Confused With: Asylum's equally modernised take , in which astronomer George Herbert (C. Thomas Howell) has to travel cross-country to rescue his family from Martian invasion.

Reasons to Mock: Adding Wells' name onto the title does not guarantee authenticity. The 'war' is, seemingly, a load of slapdash FX rejects from the 1980s' BBC series The Tripods ; the 'world' consists of a few screaming extras.

Then Again: You can't fault the ambition, with plenty of actors you've heard of (Howell, Jake Busey, Pulp Fiction 's Peter Greene) and a post-apocalyptic vision of a trashed D.C. that nails the post-9/11 subtexts that Spielberg was chasing.

The Da Vinci Code vs The Da Vinci Treasure

The Hit: Ron Howard's adaptation of the Dan Brown potboiler in which mulleted Tom Hanks wrestles with symbols, paintings and Jesus.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's adaptation of the plot description on the back of Dan Brown's potboiler in which sensibly-coiffed C. Thomas Howell (him again) wrestles with symbols, paintings and Enlightenment.

Reasons to Mock: Got around a lot, this Da Vinci, didn't he? Unlike the film, whose Californian climes don't quite have the globe-trotting credentials of Howard's flick.

Then Again: Despite brief screen time, Lance Henriksen is enjoying himself immensely as the baddie. Plus, there's a helicopter. Always worth shouting about.

Snakes on a Plane vs Snakes on a Train

The Hit: "I've had enough of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"

Not to Be Confused With: "There are snakes on this train."

Reasons to Mock: For once, the Asylum missed its big-budget target by a mile, since Plane (despite the viral hype and Samuel L.Jackson's game performance) is pretty much an Asylum killer-B in its own right.

Then Again: It must have been almost impossible to resist making this one, and at least the ramped-up gore quotient (snakes burrowing into people's wrists - yeuck!) gets into the spirit of things.

Transformers vs Transmorphers

The Hit: Michael Bay's turbo-charged actioner about alien robots who transform into vehicles. See also sequel Revenge of theFallen .

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's sonambulant actioner about humanity battling alien robots who transmorph into stuff. See also sequel Fall of Man .

Reasons to Mock: Take out the transmorphing, and this could basically be any future-Earth shoot 'em up: Starship Troopers , the Matrix sequels, and most obviously the post-Judgement Day bits of the Terminator films.

Then Again: It makes more sense than Michael Bay's films. And Terminator: Salvation , thinking about it.

Sherlock Holmes vs Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes

The Hit: Guy Ritchie's souped-up buddy-comedy about Victorian 'tecs Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) and Dr Watson (Jude Law) investigating crimes

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's dumbed-down adventure about Victorian 'tecs Sherlock Holmes (Ben Syder) and Dr Watson (Gareth David Lloyd) fighting dinosaurs.

Reasons To Mock: In a word, dinosaurs. Asylum's take makes Guy Ritchie's film look like neo-realism. Also, with the best will in the world, Torchwood 's Lloyd is no Law, so how newcomer Syder thought he could fill Downey Jr's daunting shoes is anybody's guess.

Then Again: To anybody who grew up with Amblin's Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear , it's a satisfying throwback to days when the period drama rulebook got thrown out.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull vs Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls

The Hit: Steven Spielberg's misjudged reprise of his classic 1980s trilogy about whippy archeologist Harrison Ford.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's misjudged remake of King's Solomon's Mines , about whippy explorer Sean Cameron Michael. Who? Exactly.

Reasons to Mock: Talk about diminished expectations. At least Spielberg's templates are cast-iron classics. Hollywood's last version of Mines was the execrable 1980s version with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone.

Then Again: Squint, and it's almost an anthology of bits from across all of the Indy movies. Which is at least more Indy than all that nonsense about monkeys and aliens.

Pirates of the Caribbean vs Pirates of Treasure Island

The Hit: Gore Verbinkski's crowd-pleasing trilogy in which Depp's Captain Sparrow shares a barrelful of rum with ghostly pirates and pissed-off British sailors.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's plundering of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic , in which Lance Henriksen's Long John Silver shakes his peg leg at anybody who gets in his way.

Reasons to Mock: Maybe we fell asleep in school, but we're struggling to remember Jim Hawkins facing giant spiders.

Then Again: If more Henriksen isn't enough for you, there's the added bonus of lady pirates in corsets. Yo-ho-ho, indeed.

Paranormal Activity vs Paranormal Entity

The Hit: Oren Peli's housebound camcorder horror, which frightened the bejeebus out of audiences despite hardly costing anything to make.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's housebound camcorder horror , which frightened the bejeebus out of audiences because of how little it cost to make.

Reasons to Mock: The guilty pleasure inherent in any Asylum mockbuster is seeing it turn a profit out of similar material to movies that cost a hundred times as much to make. So it's a shame for Asylum to take on an entrepreneurial indie kid like Peli, even if he did have Spielberg's patronage.

Then Again: It takes some doing making a cheap knock-off of a movie that only cost peanuts to begin with. Proof that, in The Asylum, you can always save an extra dime on the budget.

King Kong vs King of the Lost World

The Hit: Peter Jackson's loving, retro homage to the 1933 RKO classic, ramped up to 11 with a starry cast (Watts, Black, Brody), a bum-numbing running time and Andy Serkis going ape.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's cheeky adaption of Conan Doyle's The Lost World ("the story that inspired King Kong ") crawling to a generous 5 with a where-are-they-now cast (a pre- Tron Legacy Bruce Boxleitner, Steve Railsback), a running time less than the '33 Kong and what appears to be a man in an ape suit.

Reasons to Mock: Of all of The Asylum's ad-campaign riffing rip-offs, this is one of the most audacious, in that the monkey only makes a cameo at the end, looking for all the world like a strippogram had wandered onto the set.

Then Again: Made in 2005, the plane-crash premise makes this one of the first films to 'do' Lost , as well as getting to the monster-mash action in a fraction of the time it took Jackson.

High School Musical vs Sunday School Musical

The Hit: Disney's made-for-TV phenomenon about a bunch of high school kids (including Zac Efron) putting on a musical.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's made-for-DVD sermon about a bunch of Sunday school kids (including nobody famous) putting on a musical.

Reasons to Mock: Primarily known outside its mockbusters for horror, it's worth noting that The Asylum also turns a tidy profit from its Faith Films' division, in which - invariably - the heroes succeed because they've found God. This is no exception.

Then Again: 'Spose it keeps the kids off drugs.

Jaws vs Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

The Hit: Steven Spielberg's era-defining event movie, without which most of the films The Asylum is 'mocking' would be here.

Not To Be Confused With: The Asylum's crossover hit , a genuine phenomenon with irony-savvy hip kids that raised the studio's profile considerably in 2009 and got semi-sequel Mega Piranha a cinema release earlier this year.

Reasons to Mock: Not technically a mockbuster, but all rampaging shark movies are bound to get compared to Spielberg's classic...and in place of Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider this one has ex-80s pop tart Debbie Gibson.

Then Again: It has something Jaws didn't have. Namely, a giant octopus. Seeing these two go up against one another makes you wish how much of a works-shy slacker that Spielberg fella is.