Diving deeper into the world of director Samuel Fuller, I finally watched Shock Corridor (1963), which I remember Martin Scorsese playing clips of in his Personal Journey Through American Cinema docu-series (now on Kanopy, which this film is available to stream too). Shot over ten days in one location, this low budget thriller follows journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) as he goes undercover in a mental hospital to solve the murder of a patient, much to the concern of his showgirl girlfriend (Constance Towers from Samuel Fuller’s film The Naked Kiss). In the decades that have preceded between The Twilight Zone and M. Night Shyamalan, you can predict where this might go and it does go there, mainly as a critique of Barrett’s insincere reasons for pursuing the investigation (he wants to win a Pulitzer Prize basically). Yet the film also works as agit-prop theatre when Barrett interviews three key witnesses and the film becomes a series of stark, satirical commentaries on the American socio-political era with each representing a particular issue (PTSD, racism, nuclear fear). Between that and its use of nightmarish surreal imagery (especially the climatic “rain” in the hospital corridors), the film still has impact and stands as a great example of B-movies working to reflect and critique the times they were made in a stronger, more intriguing way than the “A” movies.
VHS Tracking 