Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) finds herself in Pleasant Hill. It's a sanitarium she was put in after a breakdown she was told happened to her but she can't remember. She find she can't leave--she's locked in her room and the sinister Dr. Specter (Charles Kissinger) won't let her go. Her boyfriend Chris (Nick Jolley) comes to see her but isn't let in. It turns out she's to be sacrificed to Satan...or something. I fell asleep to be honest.Perfectly boring, stupid horror movie. It's badly acted (Jolley is the worst), directed and edited. Lousy lighting too--I couldn't make out what was going on a few times. The script is just silly too. The special effects are laughable--I got a BIG kick of the obvious fake rubber spiders used in one scene. It all ends up with some idiot in one of the most ridiculous costumes I've ever seen playing Satan! It's padded too, even at just 78 minutes, with a pointless and silly montage of Lucina and Chris to show their "love" for each other. And wait until you see actor Kissinger in drag (!!!) playing Martine! And Jolley wears some of the worst 1970s clothes I've ever seen.Maybe I'm being a little too hard on this. It was made on no budget and, by all accounts, everybody went out of their way to do as good a job as possible with no money. Still it sadly doesn't work. Director William Girdler did go on the bigger and better things--so to speak. He later did "Grizzly" and "The Manitou". These were hardly classics but much better than this. A 1 all the way.

In the 70's there were many films about Satan ("The Exorcist, "The Omen") and many films about insane asylums ("One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest", "The Ninth Configuration"). It's no surprise then that someone would combine them. But it's a testament to the prescient genius of William Girdler--the man, the myth, the legend--that he did so in 1971! Of course, this film is completely inane, but so were all Girdler films, even the ones with big budgets and big stars.A woman has a nervous breakdown and wakes up in an asylum. She finds it strange (although not nearly as much as she ought to) that all of her fellow patients are dressed in white-hooded robes. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, who looks like "Meathead" from all in the family and is garbed in some of the worst 70's fashions ever witnessed, is trying to rescue her. After being turned away the first time, he comes back with a police detective and discovers that the asylum is abandoned and the doctor he spoke to, Dr. Spector, has been dead 20 years. He's very alarmed, however, when he finds out that the supposedly dead Dr. Spector "was picked up several times for worshiping Satan" (what's the police code on that--a "666"?). Several minor characters are killed for no other reason than to show off some ridiculous-looking special effects (paper bugs, rubber snakes, etc.). As in "Three on a Meathook" there's also a long romantic flashback interlude set to music (because horror fans, of course, are suckers for romantic interludes). Finally though, a guy in a VERY unconvincing Satan mask shows up and we learn that it's not good to offer Satan a non-virgin in a virgin sacrifice (he apparently hates getting beaten to the punch by a guy who looks like "Meathead").Obviously, this movie is pretty bad, but it almost sneaks into so-bad-it's-good territory. I'd definitely recommend it for fans of satanism, insane asylums, and William Girdler.

That's about all that can be said about this movie... easily one of the worst I've ever seen, and it was completely undeserving of the NC-17 rating it was given (at least the copy i rented)... I've (seriously) seen worse PG movies, with regards to both violence and sex/nudity. The soundtrack was atrocious, the wardrobe was even worse (yes, I know it was low-budget, but they could have done a LITTLE better...), it was just a really really bad movie. I wouldn't recommend spending the 80 minutes it takes to watch it, even if you are able to see it for free... PLEASE don't spend money to rent/buy, believe me, it's not worth it.

Get this title into your mind right now: ASYLUM OF SATAN. Why? Because the 70s was known for tons of low budget movies about the worst of both worlds: crowded asylums and Satanic possession. Before watching the movie trailer, I saw the full-length feature. What you get is absolute nonsense. This, being made a couple of years before THE EXORCIST, helped bring in numerous offerings about the Devil. Here, it's same old, same old. Cheap special effects are the excuse for a rotten-apple horror chiller, with rubber snakes and toy bugs taking toll on two innocent lives. Now, I've just seen the trailer, and I would have been better off giving a donation of twenty dollars to film preservation. An interesting note: the warning label on United's copy of the film is mistakenly misleading. Movies such as ASYLUM OF SATAN are junk food for your head. Just add a television set.