The Asylum

Bob Zak, likely not a household name even in households where an assortment of cat o' nine tails is readily at hand, tries for something diverting in "The Asylum", released by GwenMedia, not a major fetish/bondage label, but rather one owned by Zak himself. It's recommended to folks tired of the usual knock 'em out, tie 'em up, watch 'em wriggle opus.

I classify this as fantasy cinema, because the characters are strange, they appear or disappear (SPFX on the level of Chroma key) at will, and a serious tone is maintained -not the campy atmosphere of "damsels in distress" which defines 90% of this junk.

Anastasia Pierce is the striking but evil scientist alternately in a lab/hospital room or dungeon where some odd and threatening bondage and torture motifs occur. As in most works from this distributor, rubber is king, so much so that a period scenario set on some Brazilian rubber plantation might be interesting. They could even throw in a trans-female or two.

But even with its outre costumes and visuals, "Asylum" devolves into the usual mistreatment saga. One poor femme is strapped unconscious to a table for the duration, subjected to inhuman experiments which give the video's content a link to the horror genre, especially the more recent (this was shot in 2004) "Saw", "Hostel" and similar crap that has flooded the market. Because of the "experiments" angle this show is closer to science-fiction under the overall fantasy umbrella.

Some of the women are quite striking, especially one in an exaggerated form- fitting head to toe rubber (what else?) get-up. The violence is mild: spanking, whipping and some clamps applied oh-so-carefully to tender body parts, and a bit of lesbian sex is included, too.

The sustained mood of dread is admirable, and I could imagine these filmmakers, if they were so inclined and had some narrative creativity, could fashion an interesting story film if they had the opportunity to escape these mood, fetish exercises. Unfortunately, IMDb reports that Zak died of a heart attack a year after shooting this one.

GwenMedia did release three titles in a "Mind Control" series starring Anastasia, one of them opposite the great (soon to go mainstream) Michelle Lay, but apparently they are a separate set of movies. I've seen Pierce in many fetish videos, and more recently she's taken to acting in mainstream lesbian films for Girlfriends Films. Her most recent successes are Star Wars rip-offs centered on Carrie Fisher's classic Princess Leia character as well as many Marvel knock-offs.