Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

One night at the Bergen Field Mental Health Facility, debauched Dr. Derrek Russell (Malcolm McDowell) sneaks into the room of one of his disturbed female patients and brutally rapes her. In the daytime, she jumps to her death in the presence of visitors, including a ten year-old girl. Now the movie fast forwards ten years to the present of 1990. A new patient, physically attractive – Sandy Ramirez (Pamela Gidley) – has arrived. Supposedly a psychometric paranoid and promiscuous, Sandy is hostile to her surroundings. One evening Russell awakens her and drags her out of bed. In a darkened room he forcefully administers penicillin to Sandy, even though she is listed as allergic. His intent is rape. When assistant Michael Kahn (Geoffrey Lewis) enters the room, he seems shocked at first. But then administers another dose of penicillin to Sandy, saying that if you want to kill her ensure that she gets enough. The plan is to bury Sandy before morning and pretend that she escaped from the facility.At breakfast time, comatose Sandy is not found in her bed. Frantic searches are fruitless. Dr. Russell does spot her, or thinks he spots her, alive on a rooftop looking at him. When he tries to approach her, she disappears. Then strange events begin to happen as the dissolute doctor's mental facilities gradually deteriorate. He even diagnoses himself suffering from a form of cryptomnesia accompanied by paranoid hysteria and hallucinations. SPOILER: What has happened is this: Sandy was the ten year-old daughter of the woman who killed herself at the beginning of the movie. As Sandy wanted revenge, she haunted the depraved doctor with a series of unnerving events until he himself became a lunatic. Malcolm, disgusted with the Russell's general behavior, was Sandy's accomplice all along!Directed by Charles Winkler, the film really is not a horror flick. But the tone shifts from serious to comedy to incredulous. Perhaps a better classification might be a florid thriller, as film critic Leonard Maltin put it. At the end of the movie before the credits, as nurse Sandy – with the huge needle the size of a knife – approaches Russell in his padded cell, you can clearly hear the director say "Cut it!" The eerie music by Steven Scott Smalley is effective.

***SPOILERS**** A graying, unlike in the movie poster where he has jet black hair, Malcolm McDowell is the head shrink or psychiatrist Dr. Derrek "Sticky Fingers" Russell of the Bergen Field Mental Health Facility who's more interested in having sex with his very mentally unbalanced patients,women not men, then in curing them. It's his actions in the past that soon come to hunt him here in the presence when he's confronted with his new patient the sex crazed and a bit out of whack, to say the least, Sandy Ramirez, Pamela Gidley. Not all that cooperative with Dr. Russell's unorthodox methods in curing her he soon out of frustration loses himself and ends up killing Sandy with an overdose of penicillin a drug that Sandy is allegoric to! Facing disbarment or worse, a charge of murder, Dr. Russell with the help of his assistant former mental patient Michael Kahn, Geoffrey Lewis, plans to bury Sandy before morning and make it look like she escaped from the facility to cover up his tracks. What really makes thing very difficult for the pair is the next day Sandy's body is nowhere to be found! At first feeling that someone is playing a trick on him Dr. Russell is told by one of his patients Pat Tuel, Irwin Keyes, that it was he in fact who killed Sandy and buried her on the hospital grounds! Obviously knowing that nutty as a fruitcake Tuel is full of it Dr. Russell can't discount his knowledge of knowing that Sandy is dead and even more the fact that he claims to know where her body is buried!****SPOILERS**** looking and in some cases digging all over the hospital grounds to find Sandy she suddenly appears out of the blue fulling practically into Dr. Russell's lap from a tree looking as dead as a doornail! This screws up Dr. Russell's mind so much that he later, after together with his partner in crime Micheal Kahn, in trying to cremate her body in the tool shack he instead ends up burning alive his top aid at he hospital Nurse Francine, Priscilla Pointer. Now completely mad or nuttier then any of his patients the truth comes out to what were behind the reasons for driving the good doctor Russell over the edge! ****MAJOR SPOILER***And it was all connected in what he did some ten years ago to a patient of his that he drove to commit suicide! And that patient just happened to be Sandy Ramirez's mother!

I first saw this film a few years ago when I was viewing Dom d Louise's early works, and became interested in other actors who had once had their names written in the stars, but were now little more than B-vehicle and up-staged stars of bad sit-coms.Malcolm, of course, was one of the first to make the leap from a rather desperate film career to mediocre sit-com, and has since been followed by such lights as: Cybil Shepherd (Cybil), Joan Cusak (Joan), Bette Midler (Bette), and Courtney Cox (Friends).I hadn't realised this was his first film sporting the future-villain hair-style, but this only adds to the value of my ex-rental copy of the film.Much has been said of the camera work in this film, as a sort of a chart of a man's descent into madness, but few people mention the shot that, I feel, is the key to the entire film. When one of the patients exposes himself to a nurse, we get a - filmically - rare penis POV. I have never seen such a thing attempted in a movie, and if you add this to the tremendous whirling tracking-shots, you end up with a film that I think proves beyond doubt that Scorsese owes more to Winkler than he dares reveal.Brilliant, and standing up to multiple viewings, I have seen it several times, and truly covet my copy of this obscure American classic.BTW, watch out for the genuinely "disturbing" scene, after the closing credits, where Malcolm "interferes" with the camera, raising all sorts of philosophical questions on the nature of madness, the truth of film, and Crossing The Line (on several levels). Once again, Brilliant!

The importance of this film must not be underestimated. It was the first EVER time that Malcolm McDowell sported the 'futuristic' spiked hair-do. It has since become his acting trademark. It is the 10th anniversary of the famous hair-style, and you should show your respect by renting this film.