 Welcome to another edition of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies. But to start things off, what are we drinking today? We're drinking Louis Plantation Cezanne. Today we're going to be talking about 1972's The Asfix. Asfix? Asfix. You need an Asfix after not having too much drinking. An Arsfix. The movie is directed by Peter Newbrook and it's actually the only movie that he's directed. He's more so a cinematographer and a camera operator. He's actually a camera man for Lawrence of Arabia. It stars Robert Stevens but he was in the original Clear Patra movie. Along with him is Robert Powell. He's most notable for playing Jesus in the British miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. The movie starts off in modern day 1972. You hear sirens going off and it sort of zooms into like a car accident. A man underneath these two cars that have collided and you hear a kind of moaning and they pull this guy out and my god this man is still alive. It transports us back to the late 1800s Victorian era England. Get introduced to Sir Hugo Cunningham and his fiancee to be. Enter their giant mansion of course right. Get introduced to the extended family. Hugo's son Giles which is his adopted son his daughter Sir Hugo's fiancee doesn't even know what he does. She's like well what do you do by the way. It's like you're getting married to the guy and you don't know. And he haven't met his kids yet. Yeah nobody. It's like what the hell. This Hugo works fast I guess. He reluctantly tells her that he's a parapsychologist. Sir Hugo's giving like a lecture. He's showing pictures and slides of people right before death. There happens to be this weird smudge on all of the photographs. This smudge is the soul leaving the body at the time of death. Sir Hugo has invented a machine that does moving pictures. He wants to film his fiancee and his son on the river. You know just with some sick gondola and the stick gets caught in the river. He ends up hitting his head on a branch. He falls into the water. His fiancee falls into the water and they get kind of rushed away and they drown. They die. Upon viewing the film after he sees the same speck but not leaving the body. It's entering the body. So upon seeing this Hugo finally concludes that it's this ancient Greek mythological asphyx, your own personal grim reaper that kind of comes a calling when you're getting ready to die. It must be this. Yeah. It has to be this one thing, this Greek myth that no one has heard of. Yeah. And the perfect opportunity arises where he gets asked to film an execution, a hanging. And this time he has a spotlight, a special spotlight. During the hanging they pull the lever, the guy drops. In the beam of the spotlight everyone sees this kind of entity, he's hanging there but still alive and then finally the spotlight cuts and the guy dies. Hugo goes back to his laboratory and starts reviewing the film and everything and he sees this asphyx being caught in the light beam. He figures that it's the specials phosphorus drip that he puts in the light beam that is captured the asphyx. So he figures that if you can catch one's asphyx and hold it and keep it and never have it enter the body that you can become immortal. Him and Giles start experimenting and they actually use a guinea pig of course and they bring it to the point of almost death and they're able to actually catch the guinea pig's asphyx and hold it and keep it in this box and the guinea pig never dies. They find this bum, they're going to use this poor guy in his experiment and they poison him. The guy is in so much pain from the poison where he can't take it anymore and he grabs like a jar of acid and throws it at Hugo and it hits his face, my face! Beam shuts off, they lose the asphyx and the guy dies. Hugo is ready to like do this for real on himself and he break up some big special electric chair for Hugo's own steaming room. He's all frying. Hugo's daughter hears all this commotion and screaming and she probably smells the flesh burning at this point. So she runs down and opens the door to the laboratory and is like what's going on? Her dad's in this electric chair smoking and steaming and she actually helps Giles capture the asphyx. So now she's aware of all the stuff that they've been doing. Hugo is now more obsessed with immortality and he wants Giles and his daughter to become immortal with him. His daughter is very reluctant because you have to be brought to the point of almost dying. He won't let her marry Giles unless they both become immortal so she finally caves. They knew the electric chair work, just use the electric chair again. No, they bring in some big guillotine which is all scary and she's like I don't want to go. And she has to look at it too. Forcing his daughter to lay in this guillotine and bring down this thing and stop just before she dies. Holy sick leaves. Leave her. Leave her. Leave her. You've got to be pretty perfect with that. I think electric chair, at least you can dial it in a little bit. The guillotine, that's cutting it close, right? Yeah, literally. They have her in the guillotine, they have all the equipment ready, they're about to pull the lever and that's where we're going to end the plot point of this movie. So if you want to keep watching to find out what happens with Hugo and Giles and the daughter and how they all handle immortality, keep watching the aspects. It's a different take on the mad scientist thing. He has his laboratory, he's going insane, he has all his equipment but he's not really creating creatures or anything like that. I think one of the neatest things about this movie is the story. The plot, it's so out there and so original. I've never seen anything like this that you have your own personal grim reaper. And to stop this grim reaper from getting you and holding it so you can live forever, that's a pretty out there idea. It's an organic being that you can capture. And it looks like a monster. Actually, it leads us to another thing about this movie. The way they do that creature is really cool. It looks really good for 73, it looks ahead of its time. Looks awesome, yeah. All the vivid colors in the movie too, right? It's like that phosphorus blue that they use. Hugo's laboratory is all these vivid colors and the wardrobes that they wear. I can see people confusing it for a hammer movie because it looks exactly like a hammer. Exactly. And it takes place in the exact same era as like all of them. And another great thing about this movie is the ending, which we're not going to wreck for you, but it is a super cool twist at the end. Yeah, I kind of like that. That aspect of it is that to become immortal, you have to almost die. And there's that risk that's so close. The funny thing with this movie too is that it's classified as a horror movie, but it's actually not scary like through and through, it's not scary. But I think the horror aspect lies in the underlying idea behind everything, right? It's like, what are you willing to do to achieve immortality? Kill everybody that you hold dear and that you love? Yeah. And what if it doesn't work out? Yeah. And then you're alone forever? It's pretty scary, actually. The idea that's scary, not so much the movie itself. Yeah. I could not help but think that Dan Ackroyd had to have been at least slightly influenced by this movie to create the Ghostbusters movie. It's not a ghost. It is ghostly. It's a creature. It's kind of like a, it looks like a ghost. Did they capture with a beam of light to hold it there temporarily to put it in a trap to capture it and then hold it indefinitely. That's, that is Ghostbusters. The technology is so Ghostbusters and it's 10, it's 11 years before Ghostbusters, right? So if you're in the mood for a good classic Victorian era mad scientist movie, really kind of tickles the brain and makes you think about things a little bit more than most. If you like hammer whore, you have to check out the Asfix, great payoff and it's very poetic almost. Yeah, it's poetic justice too. Like we always say, keep drinking, hopefully forever. Become immortal and drink forever. You all should be like dying of alcohol poisoning, but you're just still alive. You're all laughing.