Review of Shock Corridor (1963) by Davey M — 13 Mar 2008
Sam Fuller's crazy, existential, melodramatic, absurdist melodrama about a journalist investigating a murder in a mental hospital, and, in order to do so, must feign madness, and eventually becomes mad himself (the Hamlet parallels are numerous).
The resulting parallel--we are what we pretend to be--is rather sobering, and the experience watching the film is pretty brutal, albeit in a perversely enjoyable, theatre-of-cruelty sort of a way. But perhaps most memorably, moments of unanswerable madness remain--a black man holding a KKK meating, Peter Breck's journalist being feasted on by a horde of nymphomaniacs, the fat man who sings off-key opera, and so on, and so on.
Fuller's assault on his viewers is never malicious, but the effect is certainly crippling.
This review of Shock Corridor (1963) was written by Davey M on 13 Mar 2008.
Shock Corridor has generally received positive reviews.
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