InjunNose Review of Asylum of Satan

Asylum of Satan (1972)

Fun amateur horror film...an obvious labor of love. (Revised review)

[7/10 · 31 July 2005]

I don't know much about William Girdler (I've seen only one other film that he directed, "Three on a Meathook", which wasn't nearly as entertaining as this one), but it's obvious that he put a lot of heart into "Asylum of Satan". Remember the horror movie you wanted to make when you were a kid? Well, Girdler made it for you. The plot is thin: a beautiful concert pianist (Carla Borelli of "Days of Our Lives" and "Another World") suffers a minor breakdown and ends up at an old, scary-looking asylum in the country, where she hears sinister chanting and has a number of extremely vivid nightmares. What's going on at Dr. Jason Specter's Pleasant Hill Sanitarium? You'll have to find out for yourself! While most of the cast fails to impress, Charles Kissinger (as Dr. Specter) makes a good bargain-basement Vincent Price. Nick Jolley must have known even at the time that he was delivering a stupendously awful performance as the heroine's hot-tempered, houndstooth-clad boyfriend, and a couple of the bit players--Mimi Honce as another patient at the asylum and Jack Peterkin as the physician who reluctantly transfers Borelli to Kissinger's house of horrors for "special treatment"--recite their lines in the corny, mock-dignified cadences of daytime TV, suggesting that Girdler plucked them from the same talent pool as his female lead. (Honce sounds like she's doing a Correctol commercial, and Peterkin reveals, in unintentionally hilarious fashion, a gaping continuity error in the script: he says he warned Borelli a year earlier that she was overworked and, literally in the next breath, splutters that "she's only been under my care a short while!") To a great extent, "Asylum of Satan" works because of its imperfections, not in spite of them--and, believe it or not, is formidably eerie in spots. Watch this film a few times and you'll develop a soft spot in your heart (or your head) for it ;)