Asylum: Mannikins of Horror

‘Mannikins of Horror’ (their spelling, please don’t write in) rounds off the film in an interesting but slightly frustrating way. This segment is in real time, no flashbacks, and is rather brief which is a shame, as the premise is intriguing.

Doctor Byron (Herbert Lom, intense) is a celebrated neuro-surgeon who has gone crackers and now spends his time making models of his ex-colleagues who he believes are responsible for his current condition. These aren’t just bits of plastic and a load of matchsticks glued together, however, indeed Byron claims that he has imbued them with life: organic parts, a fully functioning brain, a soul. We never quite find out how he has achieved this miracle (I have long suspected that this segment is so brief because it pointedly avoids any kind of rational explanation), but he is clear about one thing: they do his bidding, and his bidding is revenge.

After a very short interview, Martin sort of shrugs his shoulders and goes downstairs to discuss his findings with Doctor Rutherford. In the meantime, and over an uncertain timescale (it’s now late at night), Byron stares and stares at a doll that has his own face, seemingly transferring consciousness and the will to kill into it. As Martin and Rutherford rhubarb about methods and treatments, the funny little doll walks across the floor, out into the hall, climbs into the dumb waiter and hitches a ride directly into Rutherford’s office, where it stabs him in the back of the head and kills him.

The whole sequence is extraordinary for a number of reasons, firstly for the fact that the Mannikin traverses the equivalent of several miles of ground whilst travelling at a steady third of a mile an hour; secondly that, despite having a clearly solid and inflexible body it can, apparently, bend and climb stuff and quite easily escape from a locked down secure unit and, finally, that it goes to Rutherford’s office without a weapon of any sort, only coincidentally picking up a discarded  scalpel en route, thereby saving the manikin the crushing embarrassment of travelling all that bloody way simply to gently poke the back of Rutherford’s head with his plastic finger.

Anyway, before you can say ‘Jesus of Nazareth, Doctor Martin has dashed the homicidal homunculus to the floor and crushed it with his foot at which point everyone goes ‘urrggh’ because the little model is full of real life wet, red guts.

Finally, it is revealed that Doctor Starr is not either of the two young girls, the Jewish tailor or even the bonkers Doctor Byron (who ‘burst open’ at the same time that Martin stamped on his dolly), but the kindly man that Martin believes is Max, the Orderly (the Crowman, remember). Starr / Max wastes no time in strangling Doctor Martin with a stethoscope, before bending over his corpse and emitting the most horrible sound, a breathy, scraping kind of maniacal laughter with rises in pitch and intensity and volume: it’s a terrible and terrifying noise, and may be the scariest thing in the film.

As a coda, we see another young man arriving for a job interview. He is met by Doctor Starr and shown inside…

As you might have guessed from the amount of verbiage on the subject, ‘Asylum’ is a firm favourite of mine, a film that I have watched and enjoyed many, many times. For the most part, it’s well written, well directed (by genre stalwart Roy Ward Baker) and, with the exception of Charlotte and Britt, well-acted. It zips along nicely, and doesn’t let ridiculous things like logic get in the way.  Like all portmanteau horror films it can be patchy but, on the plus side, there isn’t time for the dodgy comic story that mars so many of these types of productions. Ultimately, I suppose I’m saying that watching ‘Asylum’ is a very good idea so, although I’ve probably spoiled it all* for you by giving everything away, you should probably get that sorted as soon as.  

* I’m not apologising for the spoilers, by the way, the film is 42 years old, after all.

That's Easy For You To Say...

I suppose that ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade’ could have been called ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade as Performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company Under the Direction of Peter Brook’ but, as the title easily made the Guinness Book of Records, perhaps they felt the point was made. Most people just shorten it to Marat / Sade.

Adapted from a play by avant-garde writer Peter Weiss, ‘Marat / Sade’ is an uncomfortable piece of confrontational drama that refuses any kind of palliative relief: you will be on edge when you watch it; you will stay on edge. Indeed, it will get more and more uncomfortable. You will not enjoy it, but you will not forget it. My wife saw a theatre adaptation in the eighties where the unease was compounded by having cast members standing around the auditorium in a seemingly catatonic state while, above the audience’s heads, someone swung back and forth manically on a trapeze. Now, that might not be your idea of a good night out but, it’s certainly more memorable than a pie and a pint. It’s the sort of thing that people buy expensive tickets for just to walk out in disgust and give ‘The Daily Mail’ something else to moan about other than brown people and, as such, is undeniably a good thing.

Uncompromising and  sometimes hard to watch, there’s madness and violence, rape and murder, as well as some seemingly interminable songs. Most of all, however, there is still genuine power attached to the production, the same power that so divided audiences who saw it performed live. The film version captures as much of this dread atmosphere as it can, and although it can be static, is much more than just a film recording of a memorable production. Best of all, it preserves some fantastic performances, most notably from Ian Richardson, Michael Williams and Glenda Jackson, as well as the wonderful, marvellous, fabulous, unsurpassedly cool Freddie Jones (in his film debut) and an idiosyncratic and brilliantly batty central performance from the purring Patrick Magee as De Sade. Strong stuff, but well worth gulping down.

Marat / Sade

The Ultimate In Diabolism

‘Die, Monster, Die!’ is terribly slow for an hour, before bursting into life with a bizarre and over the top finale. Loosely based on the H.P Lovecraft story ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ , it begins with an American scientist arriving in Arkham, here transplanted from the original New England to the shires in England. He gets the usual sub-zero welcome from a series of suspicious locals who shudder when he mentions that he is on his way to the old Whitley place, and refuse to give him directions.  He makes his own way there, finding a large stately home set on a ‘blasted heath’, i.e. an eerie burned wood with a huge crater. Clearly, something interesting has happened here – shame no-one wants to talk about it.

The scientist, Reinhart (played by unhappy Hollywood hanger on Nick Adams) is visiting his fiancée, Susan, but, as usual, the in-laws are a bit odd.  Dad is Boris Karloff, hostile, angry, secretive and prone to zooming around in his wheelchair after midnight. Mum is slowly dying of some disfiguring disease, and spends her days hidden behind a curtain. On meeting her prospective son in law she gives him such useful some advice – to get out, now, and take Susan with him – naturally, he decides to stick around for a bit.

What follows is a mix of haunted house film and weird sci fi, i.e. there are rubber bats on string and skeletons on gibbets but there is also a big chunk of radioactive meteorite that is making everyone mental and ill, as well as a greenhouse full of massive tomatoes, killer plants and a horrible menagerie of mutated animals (‘it's like a zoo – in hell’).

In an unexpectedly energetic finale, Karloff falls across the meteorite and turns into a silver foil covered radioactive killing machine. It’s pretty cool, especially when Reinhart starts throwing axes at him. The meteorite is smashed, the house burns down, the in-laws die and the young lovers escape to start what will almost certainly be a married life lived in the shadow of the horribly tragic and fucked up way they got together. H.P Lovecraft would have liked that.  

Die, Monster, Die!

Crawling, Killing, Living!

'And Now The Screaming Starts!' comes out of the traps like a mad greyhound on PCP and, for half its running time is full of thrills, shocks and the marvellous décolletage of Miss Stephanie Beacham.

The pace is so fast and the film so full of incident that after about half an hour you start to wonder how on earth they are going to maintain it for another hour. Right on cue, a strange malaise sets in, the pace slackens and it loses focus and interest, before partially pulling it back in the dying minutes with a climax that could have been chilling if director Roy Ward Baker hadn’t botched it by using all the wrong shots. Still, hey and, indeed, ho, at least we have a decent thirty minutes.

The film is set in the eighteenth century, and takes place at a marvellous looking stately home which is, in the story, the ancestral home of the wealthy Fengriffin family (it’s actually a place called Oakley Court in Bray).

Lord of the manor is Ian Ogilvy who brings his comely fiancée Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) home only for her to immediately become hypnotised by a scary portrait of his long dead grandfather (Herbert Lom). Within the first ten minutes, all hell has broken loose – a severed hand starts crawling across the floor, an eyeless corpse appears at a window and the newly married Catherine gets sexually assaulted  by the hand and an unseen assailant while waiting for her new husband to consummate their union.  It’s all go and, for the next thirty minutes it’s all killer dogs, sinister woodsmen, misty graveyards and a series of murders that knock off the illustrious supporting cast (Guy Rolfe; Rosalie Crutchley; Patrick Magee) whenever they get close to revealing what they know about the toxic family secret that underpins all the supernatural shenanigans.

The film starts shuddering to a halt with the appearance of Peter Cushing as a psychiatrist brought in to help the increasingly unhinged (and now pregnant) Catherine. I have a massive amount of respect for Peter, but he has little to work with here and, unfortunately, just becomes a giant earhole to pour seemingly endless exposition into. The upshot is that Grandad Fengriffin did something awful fifty years ago, and now there is a curse upon the family, a curse that results in more death, a possessed baby, and a complete breakdown for Catherine and Lord Fengriffin, who ends up exhuming his nasty ancestors mouldering skeleton and smashing it up in a frenzy whilst Mr. Cushing looks on and shakes his bewigged head. Not exactly a happy ending, and not a particularly well executed one, unfortunately, but at least it makes some sort of narrative sense.

As a final note, this is now the third film (after ‘Witchfinder General’ and ‘From Beyond the Grave’) in which Ian Ogilvy attacks something with an axe. In fact, he attacks two things with an axe, a door and a grave. He’s rather good at it, so I suppose he just thought he’d play to his strengths.

As a final, final note, Oakley Court is now a four star hotel, so I might book a room, perhaps get a massage or a manicure or molested by a severed hand.

And Now The Screaming Starts!