Asylum

Taking Over

Asylum
UK 1972 
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Amicus/Second Sight  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers in this one. 

Asylum is the next movie in my watch of the old Amicus portmanteau horror films. Dating from 1972 this has four main story segments which include, if you go by the end credits of the print itself, Frozen Fear, The Weird Taylor, Lucy Comes To Stay and Mannikins Of Horror. All of these are written by Robert Bloch (although it’s suspected the first segment may have been more than inspired by a Clark Ashton Smith story) and the spelling of the Mannikins of the last story seems wrong. Modern sources tell me the last story is actually Mannequins Of Horror but, looking at the different spelling uses and the slightly different meanings attributed to each spelling, I think it’s much more likely that the fourth story is actually called Manikins Of Horror. This is not to say that no mannequins appear in the movie, as you’ll see as you read further but, specifically in the fourth segment, they seem to be manikins rather than mannequins.

Indeed, the idea of some kind of reanimated figure seems to be predominant in three of the four shorts in this one. The linking material in this one is of a young psychiatrist, played by Robert Powell, who drives to an old manor house acting as an Asylum, seeking a position there. His car ride over the opening credits is scored with a booming version of Mussorgsky’s Night On Bare Mountain. The current assistant, Dr. Rutherford, as played by Patrick Magee, tasks him with finding the identity of the former head of the place, one Dr. Star, who has gone mad and is, we are told, one of the four patients Rutherford wants Powell’s Dr. Martin to interview. If he can pick out from the four personalities just which one is a blind for the former head of the facility, he can have the job. 

So off Martin goes with the orderly, played by Catweazel himself, yup, Geoffrey Bayldon, to listen to the little horror and thriller stories so he can work out which is the real doctor. It’s at this point that I suspect, even before we meet any of the unlikely candidates, that most people will see the obvious twist ending of the piece coming so, yeah, I won’t say anything further but I thought it was pretty self-evident.

So the first segment, Frozen Fear, is told through the recollections of Bonnie, played by Barbara Parkins. She is having an affair with a character played by Richard Todd, who decides to take his wife, played by Sylvia Sims, permanently out of the equation. So he orders a new freezer for the cellar, bashes her in the head and disposes of the body by slicing her up into six segments (head, arms, legs, torso) and, curiously, wrapping each body part up in brown paper and string before disposing of it all in the new freezer. However, when the brown paper head escapes the freezer and starts rolling around on its own... you know something’s up. When Bonnie arrives on the scene, she finds Todd’s body in the freezer, from where one brown paper covered, severed arm has strangled him... and then she is attacked in the cellar by various bits of his wifes scattered body. It’s silly but hugely entertaining and the brown peper covered limbs give an unusual feel to this kind of material, for sure. 

The next segment, The Weird Tailor, is about a tailor played by Barry Morse, who is threatened with being thrown out of his shop for late payment of the rent by his landlord. Then, however, he gets a customer in the form of Peter Cushing, who wants the tailor to make a special suit for him, to the tune of £200. The conditions are that it has to be made of a certain, special material brought by Cushing’s character and the suit must only be worked on between midnight and 5am each day. Now, we know there’s something up with the material when Morse pricks his finger and it magically absorbs his blood but, he continues working on it and, when he delivers it to Cushing, finds that it’s a special suit to bring life back to Cushing’s long dead son. A special spell suit the client has learned to make from an arcane book of black magic which, given writer Robert Bloch’s long standing friendships in his life, is an obvious homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, I’m pretty sure. Cushing has no money, it turns out and, in a struggle, Morse accidentally kills him. He returns home and tells his wife to burn the suit but, instead, she dresses up their store mannequin with it. And, yes, as you’d expect, the store mannequin comes to life and tries to strangle Morse, who is now obviously driven insane. 

The third segment, Lucy Comes To Stay, stars young Charlotte Rampling as Lucy, who has returned home from a ‘special’ hospital and is being more or less imprisoned by her brother in her house as a form of recovery. It’s not long, however, before Lucy’s friend, played by Britt Ekland, comes to spring her from her house and lures away the nurse on an elabourate ruse. Murderous shenanigans ensue but I think most people would have figured out the real identity of Lucy’s friend when she first enters the narrative so, alas, no surprises here.

The fourth and final segment, the incorrectly spelled Mannikins Of Horror, is more a quick prelude and stars Herbert Lom as a former doctor who has made various miniature, robot like manekins of former colleagues and one of himself. This leads directly into the bookends with Dr. Martin who is about to return to London, no longer wanting the job, when the last manekin, made to resemble Lom himself and with his own brain willed inside the tiny brain inside the model*, gets into the office downstairs and stabs Magee’s character dead with a scalpel to the back of the brain. Dr. Martin crushes the manekin, it’s tiny internal organs leaking onto the floor and, this has the effect of also crushing Herbert Lom’s character in the upstairs room. Then the real Dr. Star is revealed, another murder is committed and the film ends as a cycle with another doctor arriving for an interview to join the asylum.

And it’s a nicely done, mostly fun but unsurprising set of small horror and thriller yarns. Director Baker livens things up with some nice shot set ups (such as when a taxi cab pulls up and is viewed from the other side of a big arch in the street) and some nice camera movement ideas. One is where, instead of just following the action down, for instance, when Charlotte Rampling goes to look for something in a drawer, he pans down and zooms simultaneously to take us right into the drawer from looking at her in the shot. 

He moves the camera quite a lot actually, and there are some nice moments where he uses it to highest effect. For example, when Morse and Cushing are locked in a struggle, the camera movements, while still smooth, are short twisty turning movements resembling something similar to a hand-held camera shot and throwing the chaos of movement into the scene to depict the feeling of the fight. And when Robert Powell slowly drifts upstairs to meet the patients, he stops to look at a fair few black and white engravings depicting scenes of mental illness through the ages... something which is enhanced by Baker’s continually roving camera panning up and around and sometimes spinning 360 degrees around in the frame as it takes in the content of the black and white engravings... or they might be etchings, come to think of it.

All in all, Asylum is nicely acted, written with a certain tongue in cheek feeling and has some nice music by Douglas Gamley, although there seems to be more ‘classical’ needle drop in this one than there is original composition, it has to be said. And, yeah, there are absolutely no surprises in this one and it can hardly be called all that scary, either but, the stories have a certain charm of their own... it’s well shot and I had fun with it. Not the best of the horror anthologies I’ve seen put out by Amicus but... it’s certainly not the worst of them either. A decent watch and Second Sight’s Blu Ray transfer is excellent, accompanied by some extras worth having although, I have to say, like a lot of this label’s releases, the price is a bit steep for what it is. I would have liked to have seen Indicator tackle the Amicus portmanteau horror movies in a more price friendly boxed collection, it has to be said. 

*Since watching and writing this, the great Severin Films have also relelased their own edition of the movie and, although I was tempted, I didn't double dip in this case. I did, however, buy their new pin badge based on the film which is a wonderfully crafted likeness of the Charles Gray manikin with a little front door which actually opens on the badge itself, revealing the grim, brainy matter inside the chest cavity. The height of fashion accessories for sure.