AboveDeepBuggy Some things I liked some I did not.

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

don2507 If you ever get a chance to see this film on TCM or Netflix, then by all means give it a chance. You might find it as entertaining in a low camp sort of way as I did. Its writer-director Samuel Fuller was known for making low-budget films with controversial themes, and the film is described as a thriller, but I found it (presumably) inadvertently funny. The acting is way, way over the top, and the plot is crazier than the patients depicted in the film's mental hospital. The recurring voiced thoughts of our journalistic hero, feigning mental illness and "working" undercover, so to speak, in the mental hospital to solve a murder committed in the hospital and achieve acclaim, are comically histrionic. I cannot believe the serious-minded and socially-conscious Fuller set out to make a satire, or expose the treatment of the mentally ill, or explicitly parade their delusions and idiosyncrasies for our amusement; instead, to this viewer, the film is less a thriller and more a kind of low camp amusement.How else are we interpret the crazy scene where our hero searching for clues to the murder ends up in the "nympho" ward where they interrupt their art therapy to attack him amid his ferocious screams (and we see on the walls the results of their art therapy: pictures of naked men). On the other hand, one of the attendants is taking sexual advantage of "feeble-minded women" in the kitchen. And our hero's girlfriend expresses her anxieties that if he solves the crime he'll emerge from the hospital reasonably sane, but if he doesn't solve it, he'll descend to a permanent "depressive psychosis" (or was it "catatonic schizophrenia", they seem to mix the diagnostic disorders in this film frequently). Oh, what our ambition will make us do!

ofpsmith Shock Corridor is a film that Samuel Fuller made with limited sets and a tight budget. But out of these limitations Fuller made a truly great film. Yeah it's cheesy in some parts and some of the acting is pretty bad but it's a film that really get's under your skin. Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) is a reporter for the paper who has himself committed to a mental hospital to solve a murder. I think this would actually be illegal but so on. Whilst there, Barrett befriends three main patients. Stuart (James Best) an ex soldier who underwent North Korean brainwashing, defected and returned and now believes himself to be General JEB Stuart of the American Civil War. Trent (Hari Rhodes) is an African American college student who was one of the first African Americans to integrate a Southern University, but was broken by racism and now believes himself to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Boden (Gene Evans) was a brilliant scientist who was driven insane by the knowledge of nuclear weapons and now has the mental capacity of a six year old. Martin Scorsese said that Stuart, Trent, and Boden represent the insanities of war, racism, and nuclear weapons respectively and I think that that's what Fuller's intentions were. Scorsese also pointed out that Fuller was showcasing in these characters that the United States had become like an insane asylum. I recommend Shock Corridor though I must point out. It is not for the faint hearted.

Dalbert Pringle Shock Corridor may have been "shocking" back in 1963, but it ain't so now.This grim, bleak, ugly story that focuses in on an arrogant journalist's misguided ambitions and his self-imposed stay, as a patient, at a mental hospital for the sake of a "scoop", had no real entertainment value to speak of.It was impossible for this viewer to relate to any of the characters in this morbid film (regardless of what side of the sanity fence they were on) for fear of catching the same screwy, scenery-chewing fever that they all seemed to have.I thought that Peter Breck (as character John Barrett) seriously needed to take some acting lessons. And, once again, Samuel Fuller as this film's director, let me down, big-time.

tsmith417 When I say this is the world's worst movie, I mean that "Shock Corridor" makes "Plan 9 from Outer Space" look like "Citizen Kane".A reporter wants to go undercover in a mental hospital to find out about a murder so he enlists the aid of his girlfriend who is a stripper. She does the world's worst strip tease, starting with singing thru a feather boa wrapped completely around her face so that she looks like Oscar the Grouch, and then bumps and grinds out of sync to a slow love ballad.She goes to the police station and says, "My brother tried to attack me" and the desk sergeant immediately picks up the phone to call the mental ward to have them come and get him and that's all there is to it.The reporter gets committed as promised and gets asked titillating questions by the admitting doctor while the "sister" sits in the waiting room, and later the doctors even allow this "sister" to come and visit him regularly and they hug and kiss each other, even though the man is there due to an allegation of incest.Peter Breck, as the reporter/patient, starts questioning three of the inmates who supposedly witnessed this murder, trying to find out if they know who the killer is. One of the inmate/witnesses is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who went crazy from working with nuclear fusion, another is a black man who hates ni--er-lovers, and the other is a soldier who defected to "The Commies" because his parents never taught him the good things about America. Ooooh-kay.Each has a short period of lucidity where they espouse political and social commentary, accompanied by a from-out-of-nowhere travelogue "in color". What these commentaries have to do with the murder is beyond me, and the reporter even looks bored at one point, having to listen to them.The reporter himself is now starting to show signs of mental illness, allegedly from hanging around all the other loonies, which the doctor tells him must have first manifested during his "poo-berty". We can tell when he's going crazy because each time he has a psychotic episode he starts screaming like a girl.The best scene in the whole movie -- and by best I mean the world's worst, outlandishly, hysterically, over-the-top ridiculous -- is when he walks into a room by mistake and sees several women who are eying him. "Nymphos!" They circle him like Dracula's Children of the Night and attack him and he starts screaming like a girl again, and ends up with places on his face where they have actually bitten through his skin! You gotta be kidding me.In the end the reporter discovers who the killer is, beats a confession out of him, and demands that the chief doctor call his editor, who will confirm that he was "a plant" in the hospital ... and in the very next scene he has become a "catatonic schizophrenic", but we are never told why or how. Did he catch schizophrenia from one of the other inmates? Did the doctor do something to him to keep him quiet? Who knows? Who cares? I cannot for the life of me understand how this film could be considered a classic of any sort, yet there sat Robert Osborne on the TCM couch, spouting all kinds of praise for the director and his cinematic vision. I must be missing something somewhere.Trust me, you'll watch this movie to the end like I did, because it's so bad you won't be able to take your eyes off it, but this is the epitome of MST3K material.