Crwthod A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

don2507 If you ever get a chance to see this film on TCM or Netflix, then by all means give it a chance. You might find it as entertaining in a low camp sort of way as I did. Its writer-director Samuel Fuller was known for making low-budget films with controversial themes, and the film is described as a thriller, but I found it (presumably) inadvertently funny. The acting is way, way over the top, and the plot is crazier than the patients depicted in the film's mental hospital. The recurring voiced thoughts of our journalistic hero, feigning mental illness and "working" undercover, so to speak, in the mental hospital to solve a murder committed in the hospital and achieve acclaim, are comically histrionic. I cannot believe the serious-minded and socially-conscious Fuller set out to make a satire, or expose the treatment of the mentally ill, or explicitly parade their delusions and idiosyncrasies for our amusement; instead, to this viewer, the film is less a thriller and more a kind of low camp amusement.How else are we interpret the crazy scene where our hero searching for clues to the murder ends up in the "nympho" ward where they interrupt their art therapy to attack him amid his ferocious screams (and we see on the walls the results of their art therapy: pictures of naked men). On the other hand, one of the attendants is taking sexual advantage of "feeble-minded women" in the kitchen. And our hero's girlfriend expresses her anxieties that if he solves the crime he'll emerge from the hospital reasonably sane, but if he doesn't solve it, he'll descend to a permanent "depressive psychosis" (or was it "catatonic schizophrenia", they seem to mix the diagnostic disorders in this film frequently). Oh, what our ambition will make us do!

blanche-2 I admire Sam Fuller, a real rogue director who wasn't afraid to tackle tough subjects. However, Shock Corridor, as loud, frenzied, and crazy as it was, just didn't hold my interest.This is a low-budget film and certainly not one of Fuller's best efforts. Johnny is played by Peter Breck, better known for his work on television. He plays a newspaper reporter who wants to win a Pulitzer by going undercover in an insane asylum and solving a murder. He convinces his girlfriend (Constance Towers, a Fuller favorite) to help him be committed by saying that she's his sister and that he tried to rape her.It seems that people run rampant in this asylum, unmedicated, hallucinating, beating each other up, and it all serves to unnerve Johnny and, as time goes on, he has trouble separating his own sanity from their insanity. To tell you the truth, I was practically crazy by the time this was over.Breck does a good job, and Towers gets to show off a gorgeous figure in a showgirl outfit - in fact, today, 50 years later, she's still beautiful with a gorgeous figure.I can't say I found it disturbing because I found it hard to relate to Johnny or the other characters, or get too involved in the story, which was pretty thin. Sam Fuller wasn't afraid to experiment, and I give him credit for that. It's just that sometimes, experiments fail.

gingersac I find the subject of insane asylums and mental hospitals fascinating. During the 1960s, my mother was hospitalized many times for severe anxiety. At one time she was in a state hospital and received weeks of shock therapy. With that said, here is my opinion of the film. Fuller worked on an extremely small budget and under pressure not to go over the budget. I believe the movie worked, because it was obvious he spent much of his time working with his actors, ensuring their characters were as real as possible. The intensity of the film gave way to an energetic tension. The acting was marvelous, except for one actress: Constance Towers: her acting was embarrassingly melodramatic. The scene where she sang and performed was too long. The extra time could have been used in the hospital scenes. I found the characters believable, but not much of the situation. Some of the patients were calm, others very excitable, and others prone to violence. The film did show patients receiving medication, but not enough to keep them calm. Where were the attendants when needed. Would they really allow the patients to interact without supervision?? Why no intercom system? And the nymphos allowed to attack a man severely? Why weren't they being watched? Do nymphos really act that way? I doubt it!Suffice to say, it is definitely worth watching

Neil Doyle Samuel Fuller's direction helps keep SHOCK CORRIDOR watchable but the script is never valid enough to make the film anything more than an interesting experiment that is only half successful.PETER BRECK does a good job as a newspaper reporter with only one thought on his mind. ("Who killed Slade in the kitchen?"). He goes undercover at a mental institute in order to uncover the truth. His girl friend CONSTANCE TOWERS agrees to help get him get incarcerated on the pretense that he's her brother and tried to rape her.That premise alone is hard to make believable the quick succession of events that lead to Breck's being shoved into a psycho ward. Director Fuller lets the camera discover several other rather interesting patients but none of them are fully developed as characters we can care about.Without revealing the disturbing ending, let me just say you're liable to get hooked into watching the film if you happen to catch it from the start. It's worth a watch, if only to see where all the story strands are going.But when it's all over, you have to wonder whether anyone can really take the story seriously. Good try though--and Breck really gives his all to his volatile bursts of temper.