Asylum (1972)

☆ ☆ ½

Asylum (1972) – R. W. Baker

One of many portmanteau films from Amicus (an also-ran competitor for Hammer in England back in the 1960s and 1970s) but not a patch on the great original horror anthology, Dead of Night (1945) from Britain’s Ealing Studios.  These films always have a framing device to hold their separate stories together and Asylum’s conceit is that a young psychiatrist visiting the titular institution needs to decide which of the patients is actually the head clinician, now an inmate.  The missing doctor could be male or female, young or old.  The four stories are told in flashback by the various patients and suggest why they went insane.  A couple of the stories are quite spooky.  The first, in which a husband kills his wife and cuts her up into pieces that then come back to attack him and his mistress/the patient, is eerie enough.  So, too, is the third where young Charlotte Rampling is “assisted” by Britt Ekland in dealing with her domineering brother and her addiction to pills.  There are other stars here too (Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom) but their stories are less spooky if not without a creepy moment or two.  Of course, there is a “trick” ending to bring things together again.  Amicus made six or seven of these anthologies and really they aren’t a bad way to spend your Halloween, which was always going to be a mixed bag of tricks and treats anyway.