Asylum/House of Crazies (1972) **½
Amicus Productions scored a major coup with The Psychopath in 1966. The year before, producer-screenwriter Milton Subotsky had adapted a story by Robert Bloch into The Skull, which became a fair hit in its time and a cult favorite in retrospect, despite a troubled production brought on by a script less than half as long as the movie really needed. For The Psychopath, Subotsky managed to get Bloch himself aboard as screenwriter, beginning an alliance that would last for seven years, through five pictures. Asylum was the last movie that Bloch wrote for Amicus, and it does seem just a trifle fatigued. The framing device, although exceptionally well integrated with the stories it links together, feels even more contrived than usual, and all but one of the segment premises are very well worn indeed, both by Bloch himself and by other writers. That said, the one story whose concept hadn’t already been wrung nearly dry before Asylum was ever green-lit accomplishes the difficult feat of combining a pitch-black fairy tale sensibility with a modern setting, and one of the others contains a scene of such lasting horrific power that it’s almost worth the price of admission all by itself.
Asylum is about a job interview of sorts. Psychiatrist Dr. Martin (Robert Powell, from The Asphyx and What Waits Below) arrives at the Dunsmoor Hospital for the Incurably Insane to discuss signing on as a “houseman,” which I gather is something like a resident in American medical parlance. He expects to meet with Dr. Starr, the head of the clinic, but is greeted instead by Starr’s right-hand man, Dr. Rutherford (Patrick Magee, of A Clockwork Orange and Tales from the Crypt). Actually, we should probably make that former right-hand man, because Dr. Starr is no longer the director of the asylum. In fact, Dr. Starr is now a patient there. Just started behaving irrationally one day, and then developed an entirely new personality replacing the original, complete with a detailed set of memories concerning a life quite unlike the one Starr had actually led. The way Rutherford sees it, though, that strange and tragic turn of events presents an opportunity for Martin to prove himself beyond the unimpressive contents of his resumé, which shows a background better suited to a fashionable head-shrinking practice in London than to the hard and sometimes dangerous work of a Dunsmoor psychiatrist. Rutherford proposes to show Martin a selection of baroquely crazy patients, and if Martin can figure out which one of them is Rutherford’s old boss, then he’s got the job. Max Reynolds the orderly (Geoffrey Bayldon, from The House that Dripped Blood and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed) will show Martin around upstairs and assist him in any way he requires, but will provide no clues as to which of the hospital’s worst loonies is really Dr. Starr.
Martin’s first consultation is with a woman who calls herself Bonnie (Barbara Parkins, of The Mephisto Waltz and Calendar Girl Murders). She claims to have been the mistress of a man named Walter (Richard Todd, from Bloodbath and The Secret of Dorian Gray), the parasite husband of a modestly wealthy lady (Amazons of Rome’s Sylvia Syms). Walter was at once resentful of his position as a kept man and insufficiently motivated to become anything more respectable. Ruth was very possessive of her spouse, too; when she found out about the affair with Bonnie, the first thing she told Walter was that under no circumstances was she granting him a divorce. We all know how that usually goes in horror movies, which is indeed exactly how it worked out here. Walter and Bonnie, with no other means of being together, conspired to murder Ruth. A sensibly simple plan it was, too— Walter invited her down to the cellar to see the coffin freezer he’d just had installed (Ruth always wanted one of those), chopped her up with a hatchet, and dumped the pieces into said freezer to await permanent disposal after wrapping them securely in waxed butcher paper and twine. The fatal flaw was one that nobody would have prepared for properly. It happened that Ruth had recently gotten deeply into traditional African religion, to the extent of studying regularly under an immigrant shaman. To Walter, her hobby was just one more thing to be repelled by, and he unthinkingly tossed the ouanga she had taken to wearing for protection against evil into the freezer along with the rest of her when he was done cleaning up the crime scene. But while Ruth’s charm performed its intended function none too well, it proved far more effective at empowering her to exact post-mortem vengeance against her killer and his co-conspirator. Naturally the cops charged with sorting out what happened afterwards figured that Bonnie murdered both Ruth and Walter, because no sane person would believe what she says really happened…
Next up is Bruno (Barry Morse, from The Shape of Things to Come and The Changeling), who purports to have been a tailor all his life. The way he tells it, his troubles began when the rent on his home and shop came due, and he didn’t have enough to pay Mr. Stebbins the landlord (John Franklyn-Robbins, of The Woman in Black and Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde). It looked like he and his much younger wife, Anna (Ann Firbank), were going to need a new place to live, since Stebbins’s offer to put off collecting until Saturday would merely delay the inevitable for another five days. That’s when Mr. Smith (Peter Cushing) walked in off the street. Smith had a big job demanding an expert tailor, for which he was willing to pay £200— more than enough to cover Bruno’s rent. What he wanted was a suit cut to an odd, exacting pattern and made of a slick, luminescent fabric which Bruno had never encountered before in all his years in the business. Smith had other bizarre stipulations, too— hours and conditions in which Bruno was to work and so on, all arrived at on some abstruse astrological basis— but for that kind of money, the old tailor was willing to put up with some hassle. On Friday night, however, when Bruno went to deliver the completed suit, he got a cascade of extremely unpleasant surprises. Smith turned out to be just as broke as the man he’d hired, having sold everything he owned to buy the unique and very old book containing the instructions for making his peculiar suit. He still promised to pay as soon as possible, but he insisted upon having the suit first, and was prepared to shoot Bruno if that wasn’t good enough. It all had to do with Smith’s son, you see. By making that suit to the book’s specifications, Bruno had unwittingly cast a magical spell that would enable Smith to raise the young man from the dead— all it would take was to dress the corpse up in Bruno’s handiwork. The tailor wanted nothing to do with such things, but his options for getting out were by then somewhat limited. By the time the night was through, he had three dead bodies on his hands, to say nothing of a living mannequin…
The third cell Martin visits is home to Barbara (Charlotte Rampling, of Orca and The Night Porter), who is unique among the afternoon’s patients in that she admits to a history of psychiatric treatment. Interesting if Starr’s descent into madness meant creating a new personality who recognized herself as mentally disturbed, don’t you think? Barbara is a drug addict, but what she claims (in a curious, roundabout way) to have landed her in Dunsmoor is a case of dissociative identity disorder. Not that she admits in as many words that her best friend, Lucy (Britt Ekland, from The Wicker Man and Endless Night), doesn’t exist outside of her own head, but that’s the clear meaning of the story she tells Martin to explain why Rutherford and his staff have the wrong woman. Barbara had just been brought home from a different mental hospital by her brother, George (James Villiers, of Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and These Are the Damned), but for all practical purposes, she had merely exchanged one form of confinement for another. George had hired a nurse (Megs Jenkins, from The Innocents and School for Unclaimed Girls), supposedly to look after her and make sure that her cure took properly, but that was ridiculous. If Barbara needed any further treatment, she’d still be in the hospital, right? No, Barbara— and more to the point, Lucy— knew what was really up. George was envious because their parents had left everything to his sister in their will, and now he was trying to make an end run around the bequest by convincing everyone that Barbara was insane. Luckily, she had Lucy to take care of her. It’s just that Lucy went a tiny bit overboard with her caretaking on this particular occasion…
The final round of Martin’s unusual job application doesn’t trigger a patient flashback like the others. In fact, Dr. Byron (Herbert Lom, from The Sect and The Phantom of the Opera) doesn’t bother bending Martin’s ear about how he came to Dunsmoor at all. All he wants from Martin is an audience before whom to show off the products of his current research. In Byron’s room is a cabinet filled with rank upon orderly rank of what appear to be handmade clockwork dolls, with crudely formed metal bodies but shockingly lifelike sculpted wax faces. Each one bears the visage of a former colleague, or so the doctor says. The doll he’s making right now is his masterpiece. Not only is its face sculpted in Byron’s own likeness, but he avers that its inner workings are an exact duplicate of his as well. That’s the important part, really, because Byron’s aim is to project his consciousness into this latest homunculus. He doesn’t specify why he wants to do that, and Martin dismisses the whole business as a manifestation of Byron’s madness. But while Byron may be mad, he’s not kidding about that doll. It can indeed serve as a secondary body for its creator— one small enough to slip through all the asylum’s security measures to give Rutherford and his staff a very hard time…
Asylum would have benefited from relying on somewhat fresher source material, rather than dredging up stories Bloch had sold to the pulps twenty years and more before. You can see most clearly how the tales’ age puts the movie at a disadvantage in “Lucy Comes to Stay.” When that story first ran in the January, 1952, issue of Weird Tales, multiple personality disorder was relatively little known to the general public; only with the publication of Corbett Thigpen and Hervey Cleckley’s The Three Faces of Eve in 1957 did that rare and controversial diagnosis acquire its present pop-culture visibility. The notion that the put-upon Barbara and the murderously assertive Lucy were really the same person would have seemed both novel and shocking. But in 1972, that was no longer so much the case. Beyond that, Bloch himself had done much to raise the profile of multiple personalities by further developing the core concept of “Lucy Comes to Stay” into Psycho, which became both his most famous novel and the most widely seen film based on his work. No one watching Asylum today can imaginably come to it in ignorance of Psycho, and that was probably just as true during this movie’s theatrical run. The Barbara-Lucy segment is thus in the unfortunate position of looking like a cheap rip-off of the Hitchcock film, even though it has the older pedigree.
The first and final segments have a similar weight of familiarity to overcome, for although “Frozen Fear” and “The Mannikins of Terror” don’t recall any specific work the way “Lucy Comes to Stay” recalls Psycho, the murdered spouse avenging him- or herself upon homicidal adulterers and the deadly little animate toy have each seen hundreds if not thousands of uses. Only in “The Weird Tailor” does Asylum feel truly like its own thing, and that segment is hampered almost as seriously by a muddled conclusion in which the characters’ actions seem generally ill-motivated, and in Bruno’s case specifically, increasingly incongruent with his personality as we’ve been led to understand it. Again the source story sheds some light on the situation. Its title character is considerably shadier and less sympathetic than the movie’s Bruno, verging on the status of villain protagonist. The display dummy in the shop, meanwhile, figures prominently throughout the story, as the “person” in whom the Anna character confides her woes as the wife of a violent, angry man. It therefore has good reason for going berserk on the tailor when it is accidentally brought to life. I’m not sure what Bloch was thinking when he softened Bruno up for Asylum, but his doing so makes the segment’s climax feel like the ending to some other story.
What rescues Asylum from its staleness to some extent is an extraordinarily high standard of workmanship. One advantage of the portmanteau format was the small amount of shooting time it demanded of even the star performers. At Amicus, Milton Subotsky and his partner, Max Rosenberg, quickly discovered that they could leverage those short commitments to get talented, sought-after actors at heavily discounted rates. Asylum’s cast is especially enviable for such a low-budget production, and their collective professionalism carries the film over many a bump and rut. Director Roy Ward Baker was an old, old hand, with a career stretching back to the 30’s if you count time spent as a assistant or second-unit director, and he’d given Amicus’s rivals at Hammer Film Productions some of their most impressive pictures during the preceding five years or so: Five Million Years to Earth, The Vampire Lovers, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. The biggest asset he brings to Asylum is his confidence to indulge in long dialogue-free sequences, in which images are forced to tell the story unaided except by sound effects and background music. “Frozen Fear” is virtually silent from the first swing of Walter’s hatchet until its grisly finale, and is all the stronger for it. Then there’s the cinematography, a field in which Amicus films almost always excelled. Denys Coop and Neil Binney did sterling work here even by Amicus standards, although Asylum lacks the vivid color palette of From Beyond the Grave or They Came from Beyond Space.
The bit where all of Asylum’s strengths really come together is the climactic battle between Bonnie and the dismembered corpse of Ruth in “Frozen Fear.” Bloch serves up a scenario of truly primal hideousness, as Bonnie is swarmed by implacable severed limbs bent on her destruction. Barbara Parkins gives the scene her absolute all, undeterred by any worries she might have had of looking foolish while flailing a hatchet at a bunch of clunky mechanical props. Baker, Coop, Binney, and especially editor Peter Tanner render the scene as a vibrantly chaotic flurry of quick, close cuts, and as I’ve already mentioned, the whole confrontation unfolds without a word from either party. The final masterstroke is presumably the work of makeup and effects man Roy Ashton— all those killer appendages remain parceled up in paper and twine throughout, rendering them disconcertingly featureless and neatly sidestepping the problems of persuasiveness that bedeviled the oft-seen Amicus robo-hand in all its other appearances. (One of Ruth’s limbs clearly does terminate in that same hand underneath its wrappings. The simple, two-stroke crawling action of the fingers is unmistakable.) I defy anybody not to get shivers up their spine during the shot of Ruth’s head at the top of the basement stairs, silently regarding Bonnie while the paper in front of its unseen mouth crinkles and bulges with impossible breath. Asylum may be a mediocre movie overall, but scenes like this one are how lifelong horror fans are made.
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