I just saw the movie and still do not know what to think. It's an uncomfortable movie, no doubt nothing is "light" in the film. The scenes with the crazy 3 who witnessed the murder leading our protagonist to the mentally ill hospital are very well done. The Negro to repudiate his race and to wear the "uniform" of the Ku Klux Klan is a scene that he does not forget. On the one hand, this film is more disturbing than the Oscar-nominated "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest", made 12 years later. On the other hand, there are certain scenes of the film that seemed to me that they did not have the proper sequence, as for example the protagonist begins to convince that his girlfriend is his sister. Well, the film does not leave us indifferent, not at all, and this is already a great merit. From Samuel Fuller, I had seen "the big red one" and "the white dog", films that I liked a lot. This also I think I liked, but I'm still "absorbing" the movie.

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.

Sam Fuller isn't for everyone, but if you can tolerate writing and performances that are way over the top and don't even attempt to be realistic - i.e. melodrama in the extreme, then Fuller may delight you as much as he does me. Shock Corridor is his hands down masterpiece and for me one of the greatest films ever made. Though the first 10 min are terribly wordy and slow once underway it is incredibly powerful. Its surreal structure and complex use of displaced sound and image were way ahead of its time (pre 8 1/2) and must have left the B movie audience it was meant for completely confused. The story I heard was that the final thunderstorm was shot on a stage that wasn't waterproofed and he left town for a while after the shot. I've seen it many times and always end feeling shaken and disturbed. Try to find a version that has the original dream scenes in color. Fullers trio of 1960's films - Underworld USA, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss are all brilliant Noir, powerful indictments of American society and pretty much over the top insane. Not to be missed.

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.