If there is an odder mix of high- and low-art than Strange Illusion, I've never run across it. This noir Hamlet was made for Producers' Releasing Corporation, the lowest of low-budget studios, by Edgar Ulmer, best known for the hauntingly deranged Detour but also director of such engagingly titled items as Girls in Chains and St. Benny the Dip. In tonight's film, a weak-willed young man could (as Hamlet puts it) count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he has bad dreams. Haunted by his criminologist father's accidental death, he's pushed over the edge by the father's postmortum letters, and by his mother's unseemly surrender to a pin-striped and mustachioed lover, engagingly overacted by Warren William (who popped up earlier this week in The Dark Horse and Trail of the Vigilantes). When Mom consigns a treasured portrait of dear old Dad to the back room, all evidence points to foul and most unnatural murder, and the gloomy adolescent concocts fake insanity to ferret out the killer. The production is slapdash (Ulmer typically shot at least sixty set-ups a day at PRC), but with a neurotically urgent style, laced with schoolbook Freudianism and psychiatrists. As one of them explains, hopefully, "We're facing in the direction of normality." Ulmer's film itself faces the other way. Scott Simmon