soldiers with facial hair? With a name like "The Mind Snatchers", I naturally assumed this was a film about space aliens abducting and scrambling the brains of folks. However, the film has absolutely nothing to do with this but is instead a slightly paranoid but thought-provoking film about psychiatric ethics.The film begins with a VERY obnoxious and angry soldier, Pvt. Reese (Christopher Walken) bullying and mistreating everyone. He's soon arrested by the military police and incarcerated for psychiatric tests to determine what his issues are. They diagnose him with a personality disorder (no duh!) and schizophrenia--and, without his permission, they ship him off to a very strange hospital where there appear to be only three patients. One is SERIOUSLY disturbed and a total mess. Another (Ronny Cox) is a sex offender. And, the third is Reese. What is this all about? No one tells Reese and he's left to wonder. And, through the course of the film, it becomes more and more apparent that the military is planning on doing some sort of insidious mind-control experiment on them! Despite a low budget and that the film is inexplicably set in Germany (I think this was due to funding), the movie has a very compelling script and has a lot of interesting things to say about abuses within psychiatry where, it seems, the end does justify the means. A very good and unusual film to say the least--and an interesting early Walken role. Well worth seeing, though I doubt if the average person would enjoy this. Me, with my background in psychology, I loved it and thought it brought up some very interesting concerns.

I had a "What the hell did I just watch?!" experience with this movie, and I mean that in a good way - a real buried treasure. This one is based on a play and as a result the early dialogue scenes make it seem like the previous 25 years of screen writing technique had not occurred - lots of snappy one-on-one character dialogue and hearty expositions. It's not as bad as it sounds though; it's actually pretty cool, and soon enough it goes over the edge, with subtext run amuck. This is an allegory about the colluding interests of the military and psychiatric establishments - a hardcore, polemical one. Christopher Walken, young like crazy, is the Angry Young Man in the Wild One/Jailhouse Rock tradition, except he gets sent to a military hospital where they f*ck around with monkeys and put electrodes in GIs heads to test fancy shock machines. The twist is that the psychiatrist refuses to operate without consent - so he goads consent out of the patients by the most devious, predatory means - and then gets THEM to push the button. At the end Walken is paraded before the media in a military uniform, standing on a stage with the doctor and the general, and he offers completely vacuous, completely familiar answers to the usual questions - but before each answer, they have to push the button. The TV was off for ten minutes before I realized - IT DOESN'T TELL US WHO'S PUSHING THE BUTTON. That about sums it up, doesn't it? Another coup: when the old-maid nurse is about to be raped by the hyperactive Ronny Cox, she startlingly yells, "You don't love me because I'm fat!!!" There's a lot of detail here. The soundtrack - by Phil Ramone, Billy Joel's producer and the guy the Ramones ripped their name off from - is completely insane, at times it sounds like a cross between Philip Glass and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. My only question is, were any animals harmed during the making of this picture? Those are some stressed-out monkeys. Finally: be advised that Cox's self-buttoning scene is f*cking disturbing, even if it is justified rhetorically.

At first sight a rather obscure entry in Christopher Walkens filmography, this 1972 picture turns out to be something like a hidden gem. It deals with a topic familiar from many films, but here it is treated with great seriousness. Christopher Walken plays a young American soldier stationed in Germany. He's basically a cynical, non-conformist and, natural combination, intelligent loner, and usually the army doesn't like people like that. So he is brought in a mental hospital disguised under the outer looks of a German castle for "cure" of his "mental problems". Problem is, the treatment of the patients (there are no more than three of them) is very "special"... The low budget forced the film into realism. It looks as it would if real life prevented such a horrific scenery. In the mid of this confrontation between individuality and it's destruction, the actor do their jobs very well (Ronny Cox has his first feature film role here - probably the one that brought him into "Deliverance"). A surprisingly good, yet provocative tale - on the other side about morality, on the other a praise of non-conformism.

I saw this movie under the "Demon Within" title. I believe the movie was based on a play and at times, it shows. The movie is slow in some parts, but overall is good. The character of Ronny Cox is often annoying. However, he does a good job in portraying the pity of a man losing his mind. Walken gives an non-typical performance of a comparatively straight-laced man who never really loses his mind but instead has it robbed from him. It is not really worth a long search. But if you do come across it, check it out.