Sam Fuller was once asked whether he liked being called a primitive. He answered: "Yes, in a way. It intrigues me. It gives me a picture of a hairy ape and a grabber of women's hair. It could be a very good compliment. If you say, 'He was a wonderful primitive writer or poet or killer from Alaska,' your mind runs from grizzly bears to Eskimos to breast beaters." Shock Corridor is a lot like that: a never-ending series of non-sequiturs, surprise assaults and unmotivated explosions. A monomaniacal reporter named Johnny Barrett, obsessed with the Pulitzer Prize, has himself committed to an insane asylum so that he can solve a murder. True, the asylum becomes one of those dark, cracked microcosms of America, but Fuller is much too quirky to get mired down in cliché. The madmen Barrett encounters are strange combinations of stereotype and myth: the sharecropper's son brainwashed in Korea, then driven mad by stay-at-home patriots; the black student who desegregates a college and then joins the Ku Klux Klan; or the 300-pound baby-killer who imagines himself singing Pagliacci. Russell Merritt