Willfully walking into a wild and wacky situation is one thing. To do so in the pursuit of some sort of lofty man-made goal, and hope to pull through with all of one’s senses intact is quite another thing entirely. What is it one is really looking for? How to get it done? Does it really matter in the end? When has one truly gone over the edge? A case by case basis, to be sure, and The Edge, as Hunter S. Thompson would have said, is in the mind of the beholder as we commence on our little journey down the rabbit hole of madness.

A murder has been committed, and there are three witnesses. Unfortunately, the crime occurred in an insane asylum, and the witnesses aren’t speaking, so the main character, a journalist in a gravely misguided pursuit of a Pulitzer Prize for solving the mystery, decides to have himself committed into the institution in this week’s Hidden Flick, a sharp, haunting, and sometimes completely bonkers film, Samuel Fuller’s 1963 cautionary tale of moral destiny and mental destitution, Shock Corridor.
Peter Breck plays Johnny Barrett, the ambitious scribe, who is so confident in his own intellect and talent that he concocts a weird back-story to get himself inside the mental hospital as a patient with a lecherous edge. His girlfriend, Cathy, a stripper with the proverbial heart of gold, played by Constance Towers, would pretend to be his sister, and complain to the authorities that her brother was molesting her, and should be committed because of his pending mental breakdown and dangerous threat to society. Barrett would simply pose as a patient, investigate the other patients and guards, eventually interview the three witnesses to the murder, solve the case, identify the murderer, write his glorious story, and win the Pulitzer Prize. Such a brilliant and easy enough idea, right?
READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – Shock Corridor…