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!

Driven Pulitzer prize-seeking reporter Johnny Barrett (a fine performance by Peter Breck) fakes being unhinged so he can be committed to a mental health hospital in order to investigate a baffling unsolved murder. However, Barrett risks his own sanity in the process of doing this. Writer/director Samuel Fuller uses the gloriously lurid and improbable, yet still gripping story as a means to explore the various ways social pressure can drive a person insane, the fine line that separates madness from sanity, and the bitter price one must pay for ruthlessly pursuing a self-aggrandizing single-minded goal. Moreover, Fuller certainly doesn't skimp on the requisite sleazy thrills: We've got a sizzling striptease cabaret number, a hysterical attack by predatory man-hungry nymphos, and a colorful array of flaky inmates. The enthusiastic cast attack the tabloidy material with considerable gusto: Constance Towers as Barrett's concerned girlfriend Cathy, Gene Evans as the infantile Boden, James Best as delusional farmboy Stuart, Hari Rhodes as the bitter and disillusioned Trent, Larry Tucker as gentle opera-singing giant Pagliacci, Chuck Roberson as friendly orderly Wilkes, and John Matthews as the earnest Dr. L.G. Cristo. The ironic ending packs a devastating punch. Stanley Cortez's sharp black and white cinematography boasts lots of striking stylistic flourishes. An enjoyably delirious marvel.

Bent on winning a Pulitzer Prize, a journalist commits himself to a mental institution to solve a strange and unclear murder.I knew nothing of this film going in, and really had little idea of who Sam Fuller was. I saw "Pickup on South Street", but that by no means prepared me for this masterpiece. Anyone who wants to see life in the early 1960s, this is the film to see, because it tells it real and it tells it raw.The plot and characters have all the hallmarks of exploitation, and yet this was a mainstream film. Maybe it had no big actors and maybe it won few awards, but it should have. This film is a treasure, and one of the all-time greatest American movies ever made for its story alone.

Samuel Fuller's direction helps keep SHOCK CORRIDOR watchable but the script is never valid enough to make the film anything more than an interesting experiment that is only half successful.PETER BRECK does a good job as a newspaper reporter with only one thought on his mind. ("Who killed Slade in the kitchen?"). He goes undercover at a mental institute in order to uncover the truth. His girl friend CONSTANCE TOWERS agrees to help get him get incarcerated on the pretense that he's her brother and tried to rape her.That premise alone is hard to make believable the quick succession of events that lead to Breck's being shoved into a psycho ward. Director Fuller lets the camera discover several other rather interesting patients but none of them are fully developed as characters we can care about.Without revealing the disturbing ending, let me just say you're liable to get hooked into watching the film if you happen to catch it from the start. It's worth a watch, if only to see where all the story strands are going.But when it's all over, you have to wonder whether anyone can really take the story seriously. Good try though--and Breck really gives his all to his volatile bursts of temper.