Yo this movie might be the dumbest thing these eyes have ever witnessed and that's one high bar
So you've got this fairly offensive take on mental illness being used as a framing device for an anthology film where the psychiatrists make very unfriendly-to-patients bets leading to our chiseled lead having to interview four c-c-c-crazy loonies so we can hear their spooooky stories. They're all cackling maniacs, of course, though the film tries towards the end to make their inflections to be somewhat enforced by their horrible treatment as witnessed during the film. This attempt is slightly appreciated but lets the whole off in exactly zero ways.
Anyhow, those stories, OH MY GOD those stories.
So the first one you're kinda going "alright I can see why this would be kinda spooookyyy" as a chopped up body comes to life to take revenge on those who wronged her in life, but even there the set-up is really bizarre as a voodoo-loving wife wants to own her husband, refusing a divorce with vague threats about how bad wanting one would be, while the husband plans her demise with his lover. The climax with body parts trying to reach a person still in possession of their faculties is very silly but has strong imagery.
The second one is the one where you kind of start going "??" as Peter Cushing wants a tailor to make him a suit out of a very reflective rainbow table cloth to resurrect his dead son. The tailor kills him in a conflict and the tailor's wife puts the suit on their mannequin who comes to life. There's barely a climax as the story cuts back to the asylum the moment the mannequin has come back to life, and the whole mythology of this thing is really, really odd. The suit sucks the blood dropped on it, which doesn't seem like a good way of making anything come to life, and the book that contains the designs is basically the Necronomicon down to making the resurrected look like a friggin' deadite.
OK so then we go to the third one which is a very typically awful portrayal of schizophrenia as a dialogue between two people, one of which is a terrible killer and the other a meek pill-popper. The addition of drugs is ostensibly the only original twist to the formula, and it goes absolutely nowhere. This is easily the most skippable of the stories, and the most awkward in execution as the family nurse totally no-sells a horrific murder only to walk into one herself.
Then we get to the primary reason for me naming this some real dumb shit™ which is the framing story's climax as the fourth interview gets cut short. It's Herbert Lom, and he's made tiny blocky robot puppets with human faces and he's convinced he can transfer his consciousness into them! Our lead has enough and heads downstairs to argue ethics with the head psychiatrist, who gets murdered with a scalpel by Lom's puppet that has come to life as the film spends approximately five minutes showing this hilariously moving puppet walk very fucking slowly across the halls of the asylum until it finally gets to murdering, only to be trampled by our hero afterwards, also crushing Lom's body. Then it turns out an orderly was the craziest of everyone all the time, he kills the lead, and ends the film saying a fun catchphrase straight to the camera. Horror movies!
?
I don't quite understand what writer Robert Bloch was going for with any of these stories, especially when we get to the robot puppet men, but it's certainly quite something to see that even when he was trying to discuss the poor state of mental health care he still managed to do more damage to those ill than good to their care, implying a poor understanding on the subject matter.
I'm giving this three stars but it might as well could be one star, but I had quite a bit of fun rolling my eyes three hundred and sixty degrees around in their sockets every time this movie pulled off a dumb twist or turn.
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Film Journal 2020
October 2019 Horrorfest
