“In this new take on the Hans Christian Andersen classic adventure, a Mermaid Princess makes a bargain with a sea witch to become human. On land, the Princess discovers just how much she loves the surface world and must decide what she is willing to sacrifice to stay there.”
-The Asylum’s The Little Mermaid DVD
Ah, good old Asylum Films… I always enjoy watching movies from the Asylum because they are guaranteed to have some level of absurdity in them that always makes for fun watching experience. Granted, some of their films fall into the category of “Bad films that are bad on purpose”, which make them much less interesting to watch. I can’t say for sure whether the makers of Asylum’s The Little Mermaid intended to make a terrible movie, but they did it and I enjoyed it, so I’m gonna talk about it.
This movie is of course, a mockbuster of the Disney Live Action The Little Mermaid, and was released in the same year. That’s not at all shocking, pretty par for the course for the Asylum… what is shocking is that, at least if the credits are to be believed, all of the animation in their version was handled by one person. I will give this movie some credit, the film isn’t as awful to look at as you might expect from a film made by one person. At least, I as a purveyor of terrible movies involving Princesses can safely say “I have seen worse”.
But this movie is a particularly new flavour of terrible animation, one where every syllable that is coming out of these characters faces is being ejected with more force than a level 5 hurricane. The faces and expression work is very over animated, to the point that I suspect automation was used because it’s hard to picture a human deliberately choosing to have these characters make the faces they do.
There is also a general lack of quality in this film which pops up in fun ways… texture’s will visibly pop in and out in the background while a character is talking, a background character will levitate a full foot above the ground, another character will suddenly be wearing a green dress with chrome gloves for a single shot, only for them to change back to their normal outfit once the shot changes… you could probably make a decent drinking game out of catching all the quality errors. I can understand why some of the smaller stuff wasn’t caught, but that error with the green dress in particular stands out for how un-missable it is. And yet for whatever the reason, be it budget, time, or lack of manpower, that error became a permanent part of this film.
The plot of this film is also equally baffling. It still has the basic structure of the classic short story by Hans Christian Anderson… Mermaid Princess rescues and falls in love with a human Prince, trades her voice to a sea witch for a pair of legs, then needs to make the Prince fall in love with her or else she meets her doom. It’s all very generic when you lay out the bare bones of the plot, but trust me the ‘magic’ is in seeing how the film takes the basic plot and tries to spice it up. Stuff like… part of the reason why the Sea Witch has a vendetta against the royal family is that the Mermaid Princess’ Grandmother accidentally cast a spell that made the Sea Witch bald. They do try and give his moment a bit more weight (In this universe, Mermaid hair doesn’t regrow after being cut), but it’s still a hilariously petty reason for a villain to go on a rampage of revenge.
I’ve been blathering on for a while so I’ll wrap things up by saying this one is a safe bet for a movie night. There’s tons of stuff for party-goers to goof on, to the point where there’ll probably be a rare moment where there isn’t something to talk about. So I’d recommend this one… especially if you want an example of how not to adapt The Little Mermaid story.
Bad Princess Movies 
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