Rent Asylum Erotica (1971)

Spoilers follow ... - Asylum Erotica review by NP

Giallo involving a somewhat detached Klaus Kinski, who barely takes the time to remove his hands from his jacket pockets. For such an insanely powerful actor, he isn’t allowed to do a great deal here, but that’s because he’s the mysterious masked killer. Isn’t he?

Also featured here are British actress Margaret Lee (as Cheryl Hume) and giallo legend Rosalba Neri (as Anne Palmieri). Also known as ‘Cold Blooded Beast’ and ‘Slaughter Hotel’, ‘Asylum Erotica’ is a fairly enjoyable thriller/horror/whodunit involving a murderer lurking around the grounds of a stately mental hospital. The location is tremendous, full of long and clinical rooms and corridors in which various graphic killings take place.

There are some interesting directorial flourishes from the prolific Fernando Di Leo which especially enliven the more gruesome sequences. We get tantalising glimpses of bloodied corpses, mangled inmates and staff, and convincing stab wounds – so brief are these glimpses, that we are not quite sure what we have seen.

This certainly doesn’t push the boundaries of what can be achieved in this genre, but what it does, it does well. It would have been nice to have featured more of Kinski. With his wild and striking looks only barely made respectable by a white doctor’s coat, you know his character Dr. Francis Clay might well be capable of crazed antics. Don’t you?