A Pulitzer Prize-seeking journalist named Johnny Barrett connives to have himself committed to a mental institution so he can investigate the unsolved murder of one of the patients. Three inmates-a brainwashed GI, a broken-spirited black activist, and a former nuclear physicist-witnessed the crime. But they are 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.... But the movie is zany and far-fetched 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) (Note: Our print has the original color dream sequence.)