On VHS:
Beautiful concert pianist Luciana Martin (Borelli) checks into the hospital for a few days of rest and finds herself kidnapped while under sedation and taken to Pleasant Hill insane asylum - er - I mean "mental hospital" – by order of a mysterious psychiatrist called Doctor Specter (Kissinger). Specter is a trifle flakey, even by the standards of the psychiatric profession; he greets patients in his office wearing a ruffled shirt which would have been fashionable circa the late eighteenth century. Specter also cross-dresses and masquerades as a head nurse named Martine. But these are just charming eccentricities compared to Specter's habit of sacrificing the inmates of his asylum to Satan in order to maintain his pact with the devil and perpetuate his perpetual youth. Doctor Specter began his medical practice in 1803!
Specter tries to sacrifice Luciana to his infernal master, but all goes awry when Old Scratch shows up (wearing what looks like a bad Halloween mask) to accept his tribute and finds out that Luciana is not a virgin! In his rage, Satan napalms Specter, reducing him to a pile of charred bones, and departs just as Luciana's boyfriend (Jolley) arrives with the police to rescue her.
Asylum of Satan is a standard satanic conspiracy horror film of the subgenre made popular by Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). Slow moving, pretentious and often silly, the film contains only one genuinely alarming scene in which a blind girl (Steiner) is bitten to death by poisonous snakes in a swimming pool. The whole "virgin sacrifice" thing is obviously folkloric as well as a tradititon among writers of bad occult fiction, but we are never told why Specter was stupid enough to think that a woman as beautiful as Carla Borelli would still be a virgin in her mid-twenties, nor why Specter would be insane enough to risk his all-important pact with Satan on such an unproven assumption. Apparently there was nobody on the entire hospital staff at Pleasant Hill who could give a simple gynocological examination. The film is of interest only because the big "sacrifice scene" at the climax features an "invocation" that contains references to LaVey's and Aquino's early Lovecraftian rituals and also what appears to be a reference to the Simon Necronomicon:
The mention of the 'nine angles' appears to refer to Aquino's "Ceremony of the Nine Angles" in Anton LaVey's The Satanic Rituals. Mention of the 'Shining Trapezoid' surely refers to LaVey's and Aquino's "Die Elektrischen Vorspiele" and Aquino's "Call to Cthulhu" as well as LaVey's mention of the "shining trapezohedron" in "The Enochian Language and the Enochian Keys" in The Satanic Bible. Mentions of spoken 'keys' are also undoubtedly taken from LaVey's Enochian material in The Satanic Bible, as was the phrase "Ave Satanas". But the reference to 'Typhon (Tiamat?), master of the Seven' may be taken from the sections of the Simon Necronomicon dealing with the "Seven Maskim" or "Seven Evil Gods". Since Satan's Asylum was released the same year as the first publication of Simon's Necronomicon (1977), this a possibility. The reader should note that no material of any length is actually quoted verbatim from LaVey's Satanic material except for the phrase 'Show us the mysteries of thy creation', which is almost identical to the recurring phrase "Open the mysteries of your creation!" which appears in both Dee's translations of the Enochian Keys and in LaVey's psuedo-translations of the Enochian Keys as published in The Satanic Bible. This was probably done to avoid copyright infringements.
On VHS:
1998 © John Wisdom Gonce III. All rights reserved.