Nowt to Lose But Your Mind! Asylum (Roy Ward Baker 1972)

I first saw Asylum in 1994 on late-night TV. I were watching with my dad, who about ten minutes into the film went “Aaah! Saw this at the pictures when it came out. Total rubbish!” Still, he saw it through with me, even putting up with my turning the air of that tiny living room foul with noxious fag smoke; that’s how good Asylum is, you see.

It set off my love of 1960s and ’70s anthology horrors (or ‘portmanteau horrors’ as the more pretentious insist – insist! – on calling them). Most of them were produced by Amicus - ‘the studio that dripped blood’. They were less famous, less Gothic, and less claret-and-bosoms obsessed than Hammer yet more famous than the very odd Tigon studios, which were formed in 1966 by exploitation king Tony Tenser - surely the Paul Raymond of British cinema – and featured medieval witchcraft, beasts in the cellar, and much-terrorised dolly birds and mods. 

Anyway, Asylum is forever a flick of joyous and gory glory. In four trim little tales of malfeasance written by Robert Bloch of Pyscho fame, we encounter voodoo, Formica mini-bars, restless mummified limbs, vengeful dummies, axe-scarred mistresses, anachronistic tailors, and minuscule  mind-controlled, metal-bodied agents of evil. Welcome to the Happy House.

Young Doctor Martin (Robert Powell) arrives for an interview at a remote commuter-belt asylum. He’s greeted by Patrick Magee’s lugubrious Dr Rutherford, who is wheelchair-bound. “An accident,” he murmurs in rich, fruity tones, adding menacingly, “Never turn your back on a patient.”

Powell’s ‘test’ to secure employment is to speak with a number of hopelessly insane patients and hear their stories in order to discern which one is (or was) Doctor B. Starr, Rutherford’s former associate and now an inmate who has taken on a new, psychopathic persona. Drawing himself up with all the arrogance of relative youth, Martin chuffs that he most certainly will recognise him. With one eyebrow raised, Dr Rutherford responds to this monumentally sexist assumption by purring ‘“Him”? How d’you know the doctor’s a man?’

Robert Powell as Dr Martin: heated Carmen rollers not pictured

And so Martin ascends the stairs which are hung with framed Hogarth prints depicting the various stages of insanity, (a sick comic touch – somewhat akin to displaying foetuses in jars in an abortion clinic waiting room). At the secure ward door, he is greeted by his guide Reynolds (a cheerful yet taciturn Geoffrey Bayldon). Meeting his subjects one by one, each of their stories are told in flashback.

Frozen Fear: being the adventures of Bonnie (Barbara Parkins), once a gorgeous, raven-haired gal about town, now thoroughly out to lunch after a fight with the vengeful body parts of her lover’s murdered wife . . .

Barbara Parkins as Bonnie: fond of matching her outfits to her decor

As we can expect from an Amicus anthology, more than one grim little tale takes place in a fraught domestic setting, each dysfunctional in its own unique way. Here, Richard Todd’s porky, be-cravatted Walter makes himself a brandy at his awesome leather-padded, Formica-topped bar just as his wife Ruth (a haughty Sylvia Syms) arrives home in high dudgeon. They’re clearly a miserable couple, sniping sarcastically at each other. Ruth has just attended a “spiritual lesson” (how very seventies of her) and is sporting a tooth-and-claw bracelet she airily claims will protect her from forces stronger than life, death or evil . . . like Bonnie. Dishonest to the core, Walter tells her that’s all over. Ruth smirks and sneers that she’s glad, as she has no intention of letting him go, ever, and sinks her manicured talons into his shoulders to show him she damn well means it.

Walter and Ruth: runners up in the 1972 Homes & Gardens Lounge of the Year Awards (points lost for sticking a pot-plant in the ashtray)

But Walter has other plans, and soon, Ruth’s been slaughtered and quartered. However, it turns out she was not the biggest obstacle to Walter and Bonnie’s happiness: her voodoo bracelet is. Initially, there’s no sign of said talisman’s potency as an axe-wielding Walter separates Ruth into six easy pieces, wraps her neatly in brown paper packages tied up with string (certainly something to give Sister Maria pause) and places her in the deep freeze. 

Ruth realises . . .

Ruth chills out

But then he spies the trinket lying poignantly on the floor. Unmoved, he tosses it in with her (“Rest in pieces!”), which turns out to be a huge mistake. For in a few hours, the charm has worked its black magic: Ruth’s paper-trussed arm returns to life, escapes its frozen hell and squeezes the life out of her widower’s windpipe.

Ruth's revenge!

Later, when Bonnie turns up, Ruth’s assorted body parts are out in force and the guilty girl finds herself assaulted on all sides by an aggressive, busty torso and angry athletic limbs. Finally, the arm bearing the ‘anouwanga’ bracelet – that which Ruth claimed would protect her from forces “stronger than life or death” – breaks free of its paper and cravenly, deliciously descends upon a frantic Bonnie from above. 

Not one of Bonnie's Favourite Things

Cornered

Bonnie und the Blade

As it grabs at her face, she swings the axe on herself, and we’re treated to a classic POV shot of the gleaming blade bashing repeatedly away. Back at the asylum, Bonnie giggles and hums to herself with innocent menace before parting her ratted mane to reveal the livid, cleaved-meat scars she hides beneath it. “Now do you believe me?” she says in sugary tones. “Now?”

Never has a woman been so in need of Dermablend and a deep-conditioning treatment

The Weird Tailor: being the adventures of Bruno, a former tailor of unspecified mittel-European descent whose mannequin turns on him after years of being pricked, prodded and fingered (lucky bugger)

In a confusingly anachronistic corner of seventies London, Bruno and his wife Anna toil wearily in their failing, threadbare tailor’s shop. There’s a touch of pathos in their insistence on living in what appears to be 1947, as Bruno laments the loss of his once-fine customers of long ago to the unsympathetic, bulldog-faced landlord, who’ll be leaving empty handed once again.

Trouble brewing

But lo – here is Peter Cushing’s Mr Smith to save the day! Splendidly angular, Cushing’s curious customer sports an aura of cash and mystery, and he’s Bruno and Anna’s first client in an age. With him, he brings some fabulous reflective, white-hot material that Tony Romano will one day make famous. He states that he wants a suit made from this and his written instructions must be followed to the letter and worked on only after midnight and before dawn. He’ll be waiting for it, with a handsome payment, on Friday night.

But it transpires Smith is Bruno’s equal in poverty. He inhabits barren rooms, having sold everything. The reason for this, he reveals to a crestfallen Bruno come Friday night, was to purchase a particular book – a weighty, almost comically ancient-looking tome which he hefts into view. This curious volume is full of calibrations, formulas and illustrations of a suit – the suit.

Voodoo Vogue

Smith also harbours a green-faced cadaver in the next room – his son, he says, dead from natural causes. And it’s the suit with its properties beyond human imaginings that’ll soon reverse that. But Bruno refuses to hand it over, and Smith pulls a gun on him (in a benign, ‘This I must do!’ way). In the ensuing scuffle, Smith is shot and Bruno flees.

Father & Son

Once home, he tells Anna to burn the sinister suit, but instead she puts it on the rather odd-looking shop dummy (a facsimile of Oliver Reed in The Devils). Anna looks proudly at the dummy and says “I call him Otto. I sometimes talk to him when you’re away.” Panicked, Bruno says she must burn the suit. Anna says they must confess to the police. As they wrestle over the receiver, the besuited Otto jerks his head sideways and stretching his waxen limbs, lumbers toward the warring couple. 

The Wax Man Cometh

We can see by now that the dummy Otto is being played by an actor with bits of quivering, badly-attached latex stuck to his visage. This only adds to the humour, not horror, of him going straight for Bruno and throttling him. This dénouement is eye-rollingly daft, but perhaps fitting for the conclusion of what’s the weakest segment of the film. Bruno’s adamant that Otto is “Ay-liiiive!” on the streets of London somewhere, but he’s clearly deluded: he’s obviously shacked up with Anna.

Lucy Comes to Stay: being the adventures of Barbara, a murderous schizophrenic who’s one part classy, cerebral brunette, one part platinum-haired troublemaker.

Babs: a slave to the side-parting

With this story, it seems like Bloch temporarily ran out of inspiration and decided to rehash Pyscho set in bourgeois Brit suburbia. Still, I’m not complaining – where else do you get to see a class act like Charlotte Rampling running around stabbing folk with shears and cackling fit to burst, all while inexplicably wearing what looks like a Dutch air hostess’s uniform?

Barbara (Rampling) has been collected from the loony bin by her frightfully priggish brother George (James Villiers, eternal avatar of the languid English toff). She’s happy and relaxed, but her expression switches starkly when George alludes to the problems that got her sectioned in the first place. “That’s all over with,” she murmurs ominously. It isn’t of course, and we’re left in no doubt that trouble’s brewing when Babs’s alter-ego appears in the form of the sinister, minxy Lucy (Britt Ekland), who wears a blouse with lapels like spearheads and flares so extreme that no wardrobe on earth could be wide enough to accommodate them. Lucy is soon gallivanting evilly around the house, cutting phone wires and slipping powered sedatives in to George’s tea and generally confusing Barbara further and feeding the seed of paranoia in her already fragile mind. 

"Barbara. It appears that . . .

. . . we are all out of Elnett."

Whispering huskily into Barbara’s ear, Lucy says of the jolly, apple-cheeked dame George has hired to look after her: “She’s not your nurse you know. She’s your guard. Your keeper!” Babs happens to have inherited all her parents’ wealth, which, as Lucy points out, gives George more than enough reason to join forces with Nurse Higgins and have her slung back in the snake pit.

George: one nil to Babs

To this end, Barbara/Lucy decides to rid herself of her detractors and so gleaming shears are plunged straight into the hearts of her calculating brother and poor old Nurse Higgins. Lucy, the gleeful side of this bad penny, responds to such bloodied ends with an expression of queenly triumph. Barbara, however, on seeing her handiwork, bears the weight of guilt with an expression of slack-jawed disbelief.

Barbara - or Lucy?

Lucy - or Barbara?

Manikins of Horror: being the adventures of Dr Byron - a formidable perma-tanned academic with more than a touch of the mad scientist.

The Lomster and his metal minions

In the final segment, Dr Martin is introduced to Dr Byron (a smooth, bass-voiced Herbert Lom) who inhabits a room that resembles a GP’s surgery with a phalanx of glass bottles on display and a skeleton grinning in the corner. However, there’s no altruism in his work – merely ego. For Dr Byron has a cabinet containing tiny, metal-bodied figures of all his fellow inmates and asylum staff – each identifiable by a lifelike head. They are, he claims, alive, powered by psychokinesis. 

"Soon you'll be a man, my son!"

None too amused by such flagrant disregard for his intelligence, Dr Martin states that Byron is clearly Dr Starr and makes his way back to Rutherford’s office, little knowing that Byron’s sent his mini-me on ahead, despatching Rutherford with a scalpel to the brain. It’s a squirmworthy moment when Martin stamps on the thing in fear, only to discover that it is indeed real: teeny-tiny innards marinated in blood spill unctuously from the manikin’s mangled body.

Ready for action . . .

 . . . in for the kill.

Rushing back upstairs past the Hogarth prints, Martin discovers that Byron too, bears the marks of his crushed manikin. And so it’s left to the rodent-faced Reynolds to provide the twist ending. Dr Martin, it seems, hasn’t been at all successful in identifying the newly insane Dr Starr after all . . .

"Getting to know yooouuuu . . ."

Stare at this picture and you will hear Dr Starr's maniacal laugh: clear as a bell and nasty as a snake slithering into your BED!

While Asylum is rollicking nasty fun, it doesn't bear analysis unless you want to be immediately marked out as a contender for the Horror Buff's Pseud's Corner. For me, it stands up proudly in the 21st century - chills, spice, wit and all. (But then, I've always felt like an exile in the present.) Also, as a kitsch hound its period charms are like bonio to me, so perhaps it's more of an acquired taste than I'm willing to concede. 

Ultimately, the minimal dialogue saves Asylum from ridiculousness. If you think this is a film that takes its responsibilities in any way seriously, then maybe you too, are a candidate for the Laughing Academy, my friend. Because if camp is the definition of failed seriousness, then Asylum escapes being damned to that overcrowded realm, unlike so many of its contemporaries.

The film is available on YouTube. Like Ruth in Frozen Fear, it is in several parts (*cackles* etc).