You can throw throw this one on the stack with the others in the Vietnam-fatigued counter-culture pile, with a little extra edge to it. The Voiceover facts presented at the start lays it out quick. Towards the End of the war, a lot of soldiers developing “psychosis” that takes them off the front lines. Like, more than the average number. So whataya do? Throw them in Highly Experimental Not-Hospitals and see if they really are just a bunch of fakers? This one is totally NOT location #18, the secretist of them all!
From the open, you know it’s gonna be off kilter. Bob Denver Happy Hippy BS kind of song juxtaposed to a dreary rainy gothy guarded castle. In the rain. We find out pretty quick there’s a lot of crazy people all in this particular location. And a new arrival, apparently the best new military psychologist. Colonel Kane (played by a rather subdued Stacy Keach) is supposed to be the bees knees, to get to the bottom of all these nutjobs. But it don’t seem like Kane is quite all there himself? So it’s a weird thing between the guards and the patients and what happens when you let the lunatics run the nuthouse kind of situation.
This really is a fucked up location this mostly all takes place in, some castle in the Pacific Northwest, (but shot in like Hungary because PepsiCo financiers and a bottling plant plant there or some weird shit like that so that Blatty could finance and control the movie himself). The Castle is So gothy. Makes me want to throw on a Smiths album, then smash it because I hate the Smiths. That would be so goth! Or punk. I dunno, they both are usually broke angsty koonts. Well, broker, at least. Damn. Maybe I can be a gothy punk, it’s never too late! This one is more just psycho. And psycho-logical. Or maybe more appropriately, psycho-illogical. Madness & Evil. Chicken and Egg. Who knows which came first. Does it matter? This is an interesting angle on the bigger picture of mental illness, with some dark comedy injected with the different personalities present. Written and directed by William Peter “The Exorcist” Blatty (yeah, that guy), it has its own particular religious flavor and iconography sprinkled in with the Shakespeare and what I can only assume is the gayest biker club in, well, wherever this is supposed to takes place. Oregon? I never been to a biker bar in 1980s Oregon, but daaaamn. That shit? Judas Priest levels going on. Whodathunk? But yeah, crazy theological and gothy, with a skosh of the gay. Solid drama though, Keach does good with the role, as do the main secondaries including Scott Wilson playing Ex-Astronaut Cutshaw, and Exorcist alumn Jason Miller as a Shakespearian dog director. Yeah.
