Refugio macabro

'Asylum' holds a special place in my heart as watching it on TV as a kid in the 70s is one of my earliest horror memories, along with Rod Serling's almost forgotten series 'Night Gallery' and the underrated Cushing/Lee movie 'The Creeping Flesh'. I watched 'Asylum' the other day for the first time in oh, twenty years at least, and while it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I remember it to be, it's still one of the better horror anthologies of the period. It's helped considerably by having Robert Bloch adapt his own stories, Roy Ward Baker ('The Vampire Lovers', 'Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde') as the director, and it features a first rate cast including horror legends Peter Cushing, Patrick Magee, and Herbert Lom. The most effective stories for me were the two in the middle - the one with Barry Morse as a tailor with a mysterious client (Cushing), and the other with a fragile Charlotte Rampling being led astray by the sexy Britt Ekland. 'Asylum' has a few flaws sure, but it's still a very entertaining film, and horror buffs will enjoy it.

4 short story adaptations of Robert Bloch stories. I will look at them in order they appear...

"Frozen Fear": short story of a man who attempts to cut himself off from a loveless marriage in order to take up with his mistress by a rather inventive means of murder only some things don't seem to want to stay dead. Short, but effective and creepy with a terrific ending even if we are required to suspend disbelief quite a bit in a few scenes.

"The Weird Tailor": a tailor desperate for money agrees to, at the request of an unusual elderly customer (played by Peter Cushing), to make a special suit out of a very strange type of fabric. Only when he delivers it, he discovers the elderly customer actually has no money to pay and even more shocking is the true purpose of this bizarre suit. This is the best of these tales. However, to be honest, I much prefer the adaptation from the "Thriller" series.

"Lucy Comes To Stay": a tale of psychosis as Lucy (Charlotte Rampling) returns home from the mental hospital, presumed cured, only it seems the naughty girlfriend who landed Lucy in trouble to begin has started to visit her in secret as well. Actually this is not at all bad, it just runs a little too long for my liking. Still there's some quality about Charlotte Rampling I find irresistible.

"Mannikens of Horror": the framing story for the others in the series as a new doctor visits a mental hospital and discovers that the Doctor who called him there is now a patient in the ward. He's told he can have the job if he can identify which patient upstairs is that Doctor. Finally he comes to believe the individual is a strange fellow who makes small lifelike figures, into which he plans to place his conscience and use as his means of escape. A number of startling twists here, fine stars like Patrick Magee and Herbert Lom, make this both entirely unpredictable and honestly quite good.

Another in the line of 70's hammer horror, Asylum is yet again a gloriously camp and cliched horror flick complete with manic characters, incredibly OTT acting, mansion/haunted castle type locations, and of course, fog.

Asylum follows a young new qualified psychiatrist called Dr Martin, dryly played by a very young Robert Powell. He's applying for a job at an asylum and the interview is a far more bizarre one than any applicant for a new position would be used to.

He is greeted by Dr Rutherford, who appears to be the chairman figurehead of the asylum, who will interview him to establish his suitability.

However, it turns out there is a twist here, because in order to get the new job, Dr Martin is told he must successfully identify who is Dr Starr, the head of the institution. Simple you might think. Unfortunately Dr Starr is now a patient after attacking Rutherford and paralysing him from the waist down. Martin will be given a tour of 'upstairs' by Reynolds, the asylum orderly, and be taken round each case in order to see if he can identify which one really is Starr.

This leads to compendium style stories as we look back into the past of each patient - which one of these stories is actually true?

It must be said the whole cast appear to be having a whole heck of a lot of fun, and star turns from the likes of Patrick Magee, Peter Cushing, Brit Ekland and Charlotte Rampling ensure there's a quality behind the lunacies.

Daft in places? Of course! Archaic? Without a doubt! Fantastic fun and satisfying? Indeed!

Well worth seeing.

Very good photography, acting, dialog set this horror anthology above most others. There is a clever beginning which then evolves into 4 separate stories of individuals inside an asylum. The 1st story is the most gruesome. The 2nd story is the most intriguing and also has Peter Cushing in it doing a excellent job as usual. The 3rd story is the weakest and the 4 th story ties into the twist ending. With each story only lasting an average of 15 minutes, they keep the viewers interest. This also has a nice soundtrack { something almost totally missing from todays horror crap,remkaes and sequels} . For those of us who like style, originality and solid acting in our horror films, this deserves a look.

From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s the British-based film studio Amicus was a rival to the more famous and productive Hammer Films. Amicus didn't go in for Gothics, as a rule, but they mastered the art of the so-called "portmanteau" film, where four or five short stories are presented within a linking framework. They also mastered the art of hiring noted(and often very fine) British actors for only a day or two's worth of shooting, so that the final product ends up with an all-star cast. "Asylum" followed 1965's "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors," which was immensely fun, if incredibly cheap; 1967's "Torture Garden," 1970's "The House that Dripped Blood," and 1972's "Tales From the Crypt," and one can argue that it is the best of the lot ("The Vault of Horror" and "From Beyond the Grave" followed in 1973, and the mini-genre wrapped up in 1980 with "The Monster Club," but all of those were somewhat inferior to the earlier films). The success of "Asylum" is not simply due to it's terrific cast -- Peter Cushing (who appeared in nearly all of Amicus's portmanteau films), Herbert Lom, Patrick Magee, Richard Todd, Britt Ekland, Barbara Parkins, Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Sims, Robert Powell, Barry Morse and the undersung Geoffrey Bayldon -- or its intriguing stories by American author Robert Bloch (who also scripted "Torture Garden" and "House that Dripped Blood"), but also the down-to-earth direction by Roy Ward Baker. Baker manages to keep his, Bloch's, and his actors' tongues all out of their cheeks, and the film is all the better for it.

The framing story concerns a new doctor (Powell) interviewing at a remote asylum, and being challenged by the doctor in charge (Magee, a brilliant Shakespearean actor who all too often ended up doing inferior horror films) to identify the former director of the place, who is now an inmate. As Powell interviews the various inmates, the different stories ensue. For horror film fans, the best story is the first one (which was not the first one in the script, but was elevated to that position over Bloch's objections); while not giving the plot away, suffice to say that it takes a story device that could have been rendered very cheesily and makes it wonderfully effective and creepy. Amicus buffs, meanwhile, will recognize the linking story as probably the most effective and logical of any in the portmanteau series of films. The remaining stories are all fine, with the most outré being the one that Cushing stars in.

"Asylum" is definitely worth, uh, checking into.