Hamlet goes Poverty Row in Ulmer's deliciously neurotic vision of Shakespeare's tale, retold through a darkened noir lens for that lowest of the low-budget studios, P.R.C. A pale flower of a young man is tormented by dreams of his recently deceased criminologist father (“we were not only father and son, but…friends,” he sighs). Possibly it's just nerves or exhaustion, but his young mother's new lover, a mustachioed dilettante with a “little weakness” for teenage girls, seems to know something about his father's mysterious death, something he'll stop at nothing to hide. Putting his Hardy Boys detective skills to work (“What's mixin', vixen?” he yelps to throw off eavesdroppers), the young man commits himself to an asylum to investigate the crime. Strange Illusion matches Ulmer's deep fascination with psychoanalysis to his evidently deeper pessimism regarding the human condition. “We're facing in the direction of normality,” says a psychiatrist, but Strange Illusion is memorably heading the exact opposite direction.