Hysteria

Inventive, hysterical, and strangely beautiful, Rene Daalder's intelligent, never less than compelling psychodrama vividly brings a disturbing verisimilitude to the age-old adage of 'The lunatics are running the asylum!' Daalder creates a stylish, ballsy, and fiendishly clever descent into a tightly choreographed maelstrom of deliciously distracting dementia! This artfully staged British-Canadian Co-production has a rousingly wonderful score, a sardonic, thought-provoking text, and the uniformly fabulous cast deliver visceral performances as the increasingly outlandish patients who eerily share one squalling group consciousness, with their impish, gimlet-eyed ringmaster, Patrick MacGoohan, being on magisterially mental form, charismatically portraying the illuminated lunatic Dr. Harvey Langston with a barely controllable glee! And the sultry, raven haired, distractingly limber beauty, Emmanuelle Vaugier is positively magnetic as the volatile, darkly fascinating, but dangerously psychotic, Veronica Bloom! This jittery,frequently erotic, excitingly off-kilter Sci-horror gem proves itself to be an eccentric, enticingly Cronenbergian 'Shock Corridor' that is manifestly worth the visit!

HYSTERIA has to be one of the dumbest and most incomprehensible films I've sat through in a while, a real patience-tester with nary a plotline in sight. It's another asylum film in which lead Michael Maloney enters the scene only to discover - unsurprisingly - that the doctors are just as mad as the patients. There's some guff about mind control and the like, but it's all an excuse for overacting, bizarre behaviour and wall-to-wall female nudity, with so much of the latter that this feels like a skin flick. Pity poor old Patrick McGoohan, appearing here in his last film, for making such a lapse of judgement. The biggest surprise is that the director Rene Daalder previously made one of my all-time favourites, MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH, back in the 1970s.

Well this is quite a strange movie, British/Canadian film set in an asylum where the doctor/mad scientist in charge is as crazy as his patients, in whom he has implanted electrical devices so that he can create the perfect being (or something, I found it rather confusing to say the least). "Welcome to the last good old fashioned madhouse" he says to a new arrival. Only thing is I doubt that many mental institutions stage musical numbers and accompanying dance routines, performed by the patients, they are very frequent in this film and I found it to be too much. At one point they sing "One for all and all for one" over and over, no doubt inspired by the classic "Freaks" (1932). One of the main characters is Veronica, a beautiful patient who - along with a few other women - sheds her clothes throughout, Hysteria was directed by Rene Daalder, a protege of the infamous Russ Meyer, so the nudity is hardly surprising. Most of the running time takes place in the dimly light old building, the picture is quite dark though in fairness the print that Talking Pictures TV (UK) screened was poor, VHS quality. It looked like it was from 1987, not 1997. Hysteria is described as a psychological thriller but it is also a horror that has a dose of black humour. I didn't really enjoy it, the plot isn't easy to make sense of and I found the dance numbers too repetitive, at 103 minutes it was too long. It is an unusual movie and while it is far from being instantly forgettable it is not one that I would want to watch again.

I really still don't know what this movie is all about. Described as a "psycho thriller", its about Patrick McGoohan as a mad scientist running a hospital for mentally disturbed patients and doing psychological experiments with schizophrenia and paranoia effects. Now it's the turn of a doctor to find out about this mad experiments of his boss.

That's the whole story, and it's even difficult to fin a plot within this weird and confusing b-movie psycho drama. I guess there was no real script involved, as the pacing, the logical story and the acting all seem completely pointless. Only Amanda Plummer's performance as a paranoid wheelchair patient is at least interesting and unusual.

There are martial arts fights, seducing sexploitation, horror elements, crazy zombies just walking around and even modern dance theater scenes, but the whole senseless mixture of weirdo elements cannot bring light into the darkness but only leave the watchers confused about this very strange film that nobody really needs.

Hysteria is sort of a combination of Heart of Darkness and the old mad doctor type horror films. Patrick McGoohan is wonderful as always as Dr. Langston, a psychiatrist who is trying out a new radical form of therapy on his patients. When another doctor (Michael Moloney) brings a patient of his to the institute, he finds out that it is hard to leave once you are part of the group mind. Fans of fantasy and new age will enjoy this film, as well as the casual viewer...but it is definitely not for all.