The Asylum Delivers… Something.
The Asylum, the legendary studio responsible for cinematic crimes such as Sharknado, Transmorphers, and Snakes on a Train, decided in 2012 to birth a new atrocity into the world — literally. 12/12/12, directed by Jared Cohn, is a film that dares to ask the question: “What if The Omen was remade for five dollars and a burrito?”
The answer, unfortunately, is this — 86 minutes of hellspawn nonsense that makes you wonder if the real horror was the filmmaking process itself.
The title 12/12/12 suggests something cosmic and ominous, a date where evil awakens and mankind trembles. Instead, we get a Los Angeles maternity ward, a mother screaming like she just realized her agent lied about the script, and a baby that looks less like the Antichrist and more like a melted Cabbage Patch doll.
This isn’t just bad horror. This is “I paused three times to see if I was hallucinating” bad.
Born on the Worst Day in Cinematic History
Our story begins in the delivery room, where Veronica (Sara Malakul Lane, who looks like she accidentally wandered off a soap opera set) gives birth to baby Sebastian — a creature that immediately begins murdering the medical staff like he’s auditioning for The Purge: Nursery Edition.
Within five minutes, a newborn is snapping necks, gouging eyes, and generally behaving like the world’s angriest toddler. You might think, “Well, at least that’s bold.” It’s not. It’s just a rubber puppet covered in ketchup while offscreen sound effects do all the work.
The nurses react with all the terror of people who’ve just found out the vending machine is out of Diet Coke. Meanwhile, Veronica screams in ways that make you nostalgic for silence.
From there, the film turns into a fever dream of random violence, theological mumbo jumbo, and camera work that could cause motion sickness in statues.
The Plot (I Use That Word Generously)
After Sebastian’s delivery-day massacre, his mother realizes something is wrong with her baby — a shocking revelation, given that he literally murdered three people before his umbilical cord was cut.
Enter Mahari (Jesus Guevara), a man who looks like he’s trying to cosplay as “Vaguely Evil Cultist #3.” Mahari believes Sebastian is destined to bring about some kind of dark apocalypse, which, frankly, might be an improvement over the rest of the film.
Mahari spends the movie trying to kidnap the baby, while the LAPD tries to stop him. Unfortunately, the cops are about as competent as the script. Every time they show up, they’re either shot, stabbed, or crushed by a baby who looks like it was rendered using 2003 PlayStation graphics.
As the body count rises, the film makes an effort to explain Sebastian’s demonic nature — through long-winded exposition that sounds like it was written by someone who skimmed a Wikipedia page about Satanism during a lunch break. There’s talk of prophecy, destiny, and ancient evil, but it’s hard to focus when every scene looks like it was lit by a dying flashlight.
By the end, everyone’s dead, and the movie expects you to feel something — terror, awe, anything. Instead, you’ll feel like you’ve been tricked into watching a student film made by someone who just discovered blood capsules and Final Cut Pro.
Acting from the Depths of Hell (or Glendale)
Let’s start with Sara Malakul Lane, who has the unenviable job of carrying this dumpster fire. Lane is an actress with charisma — she’s proven it elsewhere — but here she spends the movie either screaming, crying, or whispering “Sebastian” like she’s trying to get a refund from Satan’s customer service.
Jesus Guevara, as Mahari, delivers his lines with the solemn intensity of a man who once read The Da Vinci Code and decided it was a documentary. Every time he appears on screen, you can practically hear the director yelling “Look mysterious!” from behind the camera.
The rest of the cast — cops, nurses, priests, and random people whose sole purpose is to die horribly — all act like they’re auditioning for a low-rent Halloween haunted house. One detective delivers his lines with such wooden conviction you half expect termites to crawl out of his badge.
Even Jared Cohn, the director himself, pops up in a cameo, proving that his commitment to bad filmmaking knows no bounds.
The Baby from the Dollar Store
Let’s talk about the film’s real star: baby Sebastian, a creature so fake-looking it makes the Chucky doll seem like a documentary subject.
Sometimes Sebastian is a puppet, sometimes he’s CGI, and sometimes he’s just a blanket with a sound effect. The level of inconsistency is breathtaking — one moment he’s biting someone’s throat, the next he’s clearly a stuffed toy being tossed across the room by an offscreen grip.
At one point, a character holds the baby while it growls like an angry raccoon, and you can actually see the actor trying not to laugh. It’s the kind of unintentional comedy that makes The Room look restrained.
When your horror movie’s main monster looks like it could be defeated by a burp cloth, you’ve officially failed.
Blood, Guts, and Absolute Nonsense
To its credit, 12/12/12 doesn’t skimp on gore. People get their throats slit, eyes gouged, and intestines rearranged like bad spaghetti. Unfortunately, every kill looks like it was shot through a foggy iPhone lens by someone who’s never seen human anatomy.
There’s no tension, no atmosphere — just a series of violent outbursts connected by scenes of people talking about “the prophecy” like they’re stuck in a badly dubbed telenovela.
The music doesn’t help. Graham Denman’s score tries for ominous but lands on “Windows 98 screensaver.” It’s the kind of generic horror music that could accompany a haunted toaster.
The Asylum Strikes Again
If you’ve ever seen a film by The Asylum, you know what to expect — budget horror, quick production, and an almost spiritual disregard for logic. But 12/12/12 feels special. It’s not just bad; it’s aggressively, enthusiastically bad.
There’s a kind of reckless joy in how little sense it makes. Scenes start and end at random. Dialogue loops back on itself. The editing feels like someone shuffled the timeline in their sleep. At one point, two characters have a conversation where both clearly think they’re in different movies.
You can’t even hate it properly because it’s so blissfully unaware of its own stupidity. It’s like watching a drunk toddler try to perform The Exorcist with sock puppets.
The Ending: Hell Hath No Closure
By the end of 12/12/12, everyone is dead. The baby has somehow won. Humanity has apparently lost. And the audience has definitely suffered.
The movie tries to close on a chilling note — Sebastian staring into the camera with glowing red eyes — but it looks more like a bad Snapchat filter. If evil truly took form, it wouldn’t be in this baby. It would be in the decision to make 13/13/13a year later. (Yes, that happened. Jared Cohn apparently believes pain should be franchised.)
Final Thoughts: The Devil Made Me Watch It
12/12/12 is the cinematic equivalent of a demonic diaper explosion — messy, loud, and impossible to forget no matter how hard you try. It’s not scary, it’s not clever, and it’s certainly not original. But it is funny in the way only genuine incompetence can be.
You’ll laugh, you’ll groan, you’ll check the runtime every ten minutes, and by the end, you’ll want to baptize your television.
Jared Cohn set out to make a horror movie about the birth of evil. What he delivered was the death of patience.
Final Rating: 👶🔥💩 0.5 out of 5 Bottles of Holy Water
Because 12/12/12 isn’t just bad — it’s the kind of movie that makes you pray for an apocalypse just so you don’t have to finish it.
