Absolutely the worst movie.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Am I the only person who wonders why there are never any attendants around when all the unpleasantries take place? John being attacked by the women (after going through a door that's unlocked when he goes through, but locked when he tries to escape), the race riot in the hall, etc. Even in 1963, so many patients would not be left completely alone at any time, let alone most of the time as seems to be the case in this movie.

Before the late sixties when things opened up and the new wave of sex and violence was unleashed on movie audiences and gave unexplored territory to filmmakers, the grind houses were playgrounds for rain-coat crowds gawking at nudie cuties and exploitation documentaries.Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1965) and Shock Corridor (1963) could have and probably did play these theaters. They certainly have that look and had some of the subject matter, dialog and images that fit right in. In this film they speak of incest, impotency, and nymphomania. It is these lurid laments that gave the Director a voice unlike his more respectable peers. Subtlety was never Sam Fuller's problem, and that made him almost always ahead of his time. He was puerile in his inhibitions and could be counted on to write with a sledgehammer.Although the movie is set in an asylum and has assorted perverts and neurotics, the thrust here is America and social reform. Leave it to Fuller to approach such topics as racism, communism, mental health facilities, and war through the distorted lens of the camera and the sharp angled sets with piercing black and white photography enclosed in the claustrophobic confines of these corridors.There are bizarre characters and even more bizarre dialog. Nothing here is smooth, it is a bombastic breakthrough into the little known world of the cuckoo's nest, the nut house, the loony bin, the funny factory, the snake pit, and it is crammed down your psyche with pages of pulp and some of the most freakazoid, gonzo journalism of its time produced as a B-Movie.

I knew absolutely nothing about this film until I spotted it listed in the book as one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, so that was a good enough reason for me to try it, from director Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street). Basically Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) is the ambitious Daily Globe journalist intent on getting a Pulitzer Prize solving the murder of a man named Slone stabbed to death with a butcher knife in the kitchen of a mental hospital. The police have been unable to solve the mystery as the only three witnesses are insane interns, so to get close to the truth, with support of his boss 'Swanee' Swanson (Bill Zuckert) and psychiatrist Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) he enters the hospital as a patient. With the help of his stripper girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers), originally against the idea, she pretends to be his sister, and ensues that he is her brother having incestuous feelings towards her. Now a patient declared insane and in the asylum, and sharing a room with opera obsessed Pagliacci (Golden Globe nominated Larry Tucker), he works his way around, while at the same having mental treatment, and one by one he approaches the three inmate witnesses aware that they all have their moments of sanity. First is former soldier Stuart (James Best) who believes he is in the old confederate army, and the only clue Johnny gets from in his five minutes or so is that the killer wears white trousers. Second is former black university student Trent (Hari Rhodes) who is confused into thinking he is white and wanting to get rid of other black people, i.e. becoming racist and forming his own KKK (Ku Klux Klan), and his clue in the moment of sanity is that the killer is not a patient but an attendant. When Johnny is visited by Cathy she knows that his being in the mental hospital is getting to him, he is slowly truly going insane himself, i.e. believing she really is her sister, and we see this in the asylum too when there are moments he loses his voice and of course his mind. Finally the third witness, former physicist Dr. Boden (Gene Evans) who has developed the mind of a child, in his moment of sanity gives the journalist the answer he wants, Slone's killer's name, it's Wilkes (Chuck Roberson). But with Johnny's mentality collapsing he momentarily forgets this information when he tries to tell the head of the hospital, but Wilkes finds out that he knows his secret. In the end, after a big fight and a confession from the killer, Johnny is allowed to write his expose and he does win the Pulitzer Prize, but is immediately returned to the institution having completely gone insane and become a catatonic schizophrenic. Also starring Paul Dubov as Dr. J.L. Menkin, Neyle Morrow as Psycho, John Matthews as Dr. L.G. Cristo, John Craig as Lloyd and Frank Gerstle as Lt. Kane and Rachel Romen. If you took One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and mixed it with elements of The Departed and Shutter Island, then this is exactly what comes to mind. Breck gives an extraordinary performance as the undercover writer with his mental state deteriorating, Towers has her small moments, and all the actors playing the insane characters, notably Tucker, are amazing. The script and direction by Fuller is superb with all the right styles to create both disturbing and gripping moments, it holds you like a really tight straight jacket would, it is such a brilliant psychological drama that I would definitely recommend. Very, very good!

When I say this is the world's worst movie, I mean that "Shock Corridor" makes "Plan 9 from Outer Space" look like "Citizen Kane".A reporter wants to go undercover in a mental hospital to find out about a murder so he enlists the aid of his girlfriend who is a stripper. She does the world's worst strip tease, starting with singing thru a feather boa wrapped completely around her face so that she looks like Oscar the Grouch, and then bumps and grinds out of sync to a slow love ballad.She goes to the police station and says, "My brother tried to attack me" and the desk sergeant immediately picks up the phone to call the mental ward to have them come and get him and that's all there is to it.The reporter gets committed as promised and gets asked titillating questions by the admitting doctor while the "sister" sits in the waiting room, and later the doctors even allow this "sister" to come and visit him regularly and they hug and kiss each other, even though the man is there due to an allegation of incest.Peter Breck, as the reporter/patient, starts questioning three of the inmates who supposedly witnessed this murder, trying to find out if they know who the killer is. One of the inmate/witnesses is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who went crazy from working with nuclear fusion, another is a black man who hates ni--er-lovers, and the other is a soldier who defected to "The Commies" because his parents never taught him the good things about America. Ooooh-kay.Each has a short period of lucidity where they espouse political and social commentary, accompanied by a from-out-of-nowhere travelogue "in color". What these commentaries have to do with the murder is beyond me, and the reporter even looks bored at one point, having to listen to them.The reporter himself is now starting to show signs of mental illness, allegedly from hanging around all the other loonies, which the doctor tells him must have first manifested during his "poo-berty". We can tell when he's going crazy because each time he has a psychotic episode he starts screaming like a girl.The best scene in the whole movie -- and by best I mean the world's worst, outlandishly, hysterically, over-the-top ridiculous -- is when he walks into a room by mistake and sees several women who are eying him. "Nymphos!" They circle him like Dracula's Children of the Night and attack him and he starts screaming like a girl again, and ends up with places on his face where they have actually bitten through his skin! You gotta be kidding me.In the end the reporter discovers who the killer is, beats a confession out of him, and demands that the chief doctor call his editor, who will confirm that he was "a plant" in the hospital ... and in the very next scene he has become a "catatonic schizophrenic", but we are never told why or how. Did he catch schizophrenia from one of the other inmates? Did the doctor do something to him to keep him quiet? Who knows? Who cares? I cannot for the life of me understand how this film could be considered a classic of any sort, yet there sat Robert Osborne on the TCM couch, spouting all kinds of praise for the director and his cinematic vision. I must be missing something somewhere.Trust me, you'll watch this movie to the end like I did, because it's so bad you won't be able to take your eyes off it, but this is the epitome of MST3K material.