Asylum [House of Crazies] *** (1972, Robert Powell, Charlotte Rampling, Patrick Magee, Sylvia Syms, Richard Todd, Peter Cushing, Geoffrey Bayldon, Barbara Parkins, Barry Morse, Britt Ekland, Herbert Lom) – Classic Movie Review 3093

Director Roy Ward Baker’s 1972 British horror film is the third Amicus portmanteau movie collection of stories from the pen of screen-writer Robert Bloch (Psycho). An excellent cast underplays the chills and the black humour and Baker directs powerfully in cinematographer Denys N Coop’s attractive Technicolor images and on art director Tony Curtis’s atmospheric sets.

Bloch bases his screenplay on four unrelated stories he had previously written and creates a bridging story for them. This ingenious linking device has Robert Powell playing a young psychiatrist who has to identify a mad doctor from the patients in a gothic mental institution asylum to a gain a new appointment.

Cue four suitably weird tales about a magic suit that tailor Bruno (Barry Morse) has to make with some highly unusual qualities for his mysterious client (Peter Cushing) (The Weird Tailor’); a murdered wife’s living corpse from the freezer taking revenge (‘Frozen Fear’); sexy Lucy (Britt Ekland) leading astray a homicidal woman (Charlotte Rampling) when it appears that her brother is conspiring against her (‘Lucy Comes to Stay’); and a man who builds tiny toy robots with lifelike human heads (‘Mannikins of Horror’). And there is a Grand Guignol finale with a neat twist ending.

It also stars Patrick Magee, Sylvia Syms, Richard Todd, Geoffrey Bayldon, Barbara Parkins, James Villiers, Megs Jenkins, Herbert Lom, Ann Firbank and John Franklyn-Roberts.

The Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and Asylum (1972) were the three Amicus portmanteau films written by Robert Bloch and based on his own stories. Amicus’s other portmanteau films include Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Vault of Horror (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3093

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