![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And so this he does, coolly offing his wife in a scene that proceeds with the nastiest briskness and lack of any sort of sentiment: Ruth seems nice, outside of her aggressive jealous streak, Walter is a cold-blooded psychopath, and we've got nowhere to go while we watch him chop her down without so much as breaking into a sweat.Įven for a single segment of an anthology film, that's not nearly enough for an actual story, of course, so it's not at all shocking that there's more to it than that. And this plan involved hiding her body by chopping it into pieces, wrapping them in brown paper, and stashing them in the big coffin freezer in the basement, later to dispose of them bit by bit. Starr had to be a "him" - and she tells him the story "Frozen Fear": her lover, Walter (Richard Todd), concocted a plan with her to murder his wife Ruth (Sylvia Syms). Martin's first visit is to Bonnie (Barbara Perkins) - Rutherford has already nastily mocked him for presuming that Dr. But he's going overboard in making the titular asylum seem menacing and disorienting, including a hell of a weird POV shot as Martin looks at creepy sketches hanging on the wall, and the camera cranes around in a way suggesting that the young doctor is currently levitating at a 135-degree angle to the floor.Īnyway, Dr. He was bringing a lot of different skills to Asylum is what I mean to say, and you see them on display in various throughout the whole movie. Though he is almost unquestionably best-known for the British-made 1958 account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, A Night to Remember, by general acclaim the most artistically and historically successful film on the subject. Director Roy Ward Baker had a well-honed talent in genre schlock, having made several pictures for Hammer Films prior to this, the first of three movies he directed at Amicus, and he also had some substantial Hollywood credits to his name, including one of the finest of the '50s 3-D movies, Inferno. None of this is a complaint! The good news is that Asylum has the filmmaking chops to compensate for the slightly half-baked feeling of its horrifying little anecdotes. There's also an odd sense that the stakes of the framework narrative matter more than the stakes of the individual segments: since we're meeting the narrators of those tales, we know that they're not going to die, and they end up not really resolving in any other way they reach a point of emotional climax and then leap right back to the storyteller looking aghast while Martin ponders their words. And even without these things, the framework gets an unusual amount of attention, both stylistically and narratively, starting right from its delightfully tongue-in-cheek opening, with Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain storming across the shots of Martin arriving at the asylum, adding a nice note of over-the-top horror movie grumbling (Mussorgsky will return, in the form of Pictures at an Exhibition, and Douglas Gamley's playfully clichéd "original" score echoing the composer's work as well). The conclusion to the third story is given in the framework, and fourth story takes place within the framing narrative, such that it really doesn't make sense to talk about them as separate things. And the film sort of knows it: the framing narrative is unusually active, so much so that this stretches the very idea of an "anthology" film (or, to use the favored word of Amicus Productions, who created Asylum, a "portmanteau") to the point where it barely feels like it still applies. I regret to say that Asylum's individual tales of madness and terror don't end up entirely live up to the pulpy brilliance of that framing narrative, though it would take a whole hell of a lot for them to do so. Cue the individual segments, adapted by Robert Bloch from his own short stories. Guided to the hallway where these patients live by orderly Max Reynolds (Geoffrey Bayldon), Martin listens to each of their tales, all surely the sign of a profoundly broken mind. Starr, who has had a complete mental breakdown and adopted an entirely new personality. And he has an experiment in mind right now: if Martin is so good, surely he won't have any problem figuring out which of four particularly misbegotten souls is the former head of the asylum, Dr. Rutherford (Parick McGee), seems like a bit of an asshole, the kind of person who usually has a position of authority at a movie asylum, who views the patients more as experiments to run than people to help. Martin (Robert Powell), a young psychiatrist, arriving at a remote insane asylum for a job interview. Asylum might have the single best hook of any anthology film I have seen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |