A Pulitzer Prize-seeking journalist named Johnny Barrett connives to have himself committed to a mental institution, so that he can investigate the unsolved murder of one of the patients. Three inmates witnessed the crime: a brainwashed G.I., a broken-spirited black activist, and a former nuclear physicist. They're too far gone to be of help and, what's more, they're taking Johnny with them: his paranoid nightmares are matched only by his waking reality (e.g. the 300-pound "Pagliacci" who performs arias while seated on Johnny's chest). "Fuller created a fascinatingly lurid, cheap paperback of a movie...(His) attempts at exposing the social and moral failings of American society are gross, heavyhanded, and predictable. But the movie is zany and farfetched enough to overcome its faults...The mental hospital (is) cartoonish, but the brutality of the place is rendered as vividly as it was in Val Lewton's Bedlam (1946) and is just as frightening. The French, of course, take these satires as evidence-literal exposés of American life-and they're no more than half wrong, maybe less." --Barry Gifford