6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A young psychiatrist interviews four inmates in a mental asylum to satisfy a requirement for employment. He hears stories about (1) the revenge of a murdered wife, (2) a tailor who makes a suit with some highly unusual qualities, (3) a woman who questions her sanity when it appears that her brother is conspiring against her, and (4) a man who builds tiny toy robots with lifelike human heads...
Starring: Peter Cushing, Britt Ekland, Herbert Lom, Patrick Magee (I), Barry MorseHorror | 100% |
Mystery | 6% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 16-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
BDInfo
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Note: This film is available both as a standalone product and also as part of the box set The Amicus Collection.
The recently reviewed Hammer Horror:
The Warner Bros. Years makes an interesting point in passing that, as iconic as Hammer Films’ horror outings undeniably were, there
were other studios pumping out product whose features were at least occasionally mistaken for being Hammer productions, when in fact
they weren’t. Probably prime among these examples would be Amicus Productions, a British institution that was nonetheless founded by two
Americans, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky. Rosenberg and Subotsky themselves had a somewhat infamous Hammer Films connection,
having (according to Rosenberg, anyway) come up with the project that ultimately became The Curse of Frankenstein, a 1957 opus that was Hammer’s first horror outing in color, Hammer’s first “reboot”
of a venerable horror character, and arguably the film that set the tone for what became a decade or more of Hammer’s preeminence in the horror
genre. Subotsky and Rosenberg were kind of pushed to the sidelines on the project, receiving no credit, and (again according to Rosenberg) even
handing over their meager $5000 payday to Ray Stark in exchange for a promised partnership which never manifested. There was obviously some
kind of discord associated with this film, at least from the perspective of Rosenberg (who’s on hand in some archival interviews in this set,
disparaging both Hammer in general and Eliot Hyman in particular), something that may have led to Rosenberg and Subotsky deciding to set out
on their own when they could hopefully be captains of their own fate.
Kind of interestingly, then, while Subotsky and Rosenberg had gotten into the
horror game before the creation of Amicus with the 1960 film
The City of the Dead (note that the link points to a British release), their first two outings in their guise as Amicus Productions were
quasi-musicals designed to appeal to the teen set, It's Trad, Dad!
(directed by none other than Richard Lester) and Just for Fun. While Amicus occasionally varied outside of its largely self imposed horror
limits, including with a couple of Doctor Who related feature films, Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks — Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., the studio is arguably best remembered
today for its so-called portmanteau features, films which typically included four or five at least tangentially linked stories into one film.
The first of these portmanteau efforts was 1965’s Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (note that the link points to a German release, though it’s region free and I personally
found the technical merits better than the domestic release from Olive). That film set the portmanteau template for Amicus, where typically some kind of framing story would link the
“episodes” contained within the film, and that’s pretty much exactly what one of the films in this new Amicus set (Asylum) does. Kind of interestingly, though, the two other feature films in the Amicus
Collection are the somewhat rarer outings from Amicus that offer only one narrative thread for the entire film. Of those other features, one (And Now the Screaming Starts) is the
really rare Amicus offering that traffics in what had been Hammer's stock in trade, Gothic horror.
Asylum is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This transfer is kind of the "middle child" of the Amicus box set, not as shoddy looking as The Beast Must Die, but not quite at the level that And Now the Screaming Starts offers. The palette is just slightly anemic looking, and densities occasionally fluctuate throughout the presentation. Detail levels are generally "okay" looking, but a lot of the presentation is on the soft side, though some extreme close-ups offer rather commendable fine detail levels. There's some fairly noisy looking grain during the optical credits sequence, but once the actual story starts, things calm down and there are no major resolution issues from that point forward. There are occasional hiccups like misaligned frames and scratches and the like that show up from time to time, but on the whole this is perfectly watchable without any huge problems.
Asylum features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix that capably supports the film's dialogue and sometimes fun sound effects. Whoever thought shoehorning in "Night on Bald Mountain" as underscore might have thought twice (that's a joke), but the orchestral cues sound generally bright, if a bit on the narrow side. Fidelity is fine, and there are no issues with damage.
Asylum is the one offering in the Amicus Collection that has "Amicus" written all over it (so to speak). This is another enjoyable if kind of slight anthology that has a few minor scares along the way, but is probably a bit too silly to ever really frighten (which may indeed have been the intent). Technical merits are generally okay if never overwhelming, but the supplementary package is quite enjoyable.
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