The Fifth Floor

I saw this film as a kid and I remember the advertisments for it on tv made it look like it would be as scary as The Shining. It really isn't scary at all. The actors do a fine job, Dianne Hull (whatever happened to her?) makes a nice damsel in distress. Its funny seeing Robert Englund before he played Freddy Kruger. A young disco dancer is mistakingly committed to an asylum after someone drugs her. It makes you think because there really have been a lot of cases like this. I don't remember what happened in the end, but I don't think it had a happy ending.

A woman (Dianne Hull) is poisoned with strychnine while disco dancing (now THAT might have been an effective way to stop disco). Everyone (including her clueless boyfriend) takes her poisoning to be a suicide attempt and she ends up involuntarily committed to a co-ed mental institution where there is a lot of melodrama, but really little that goes beyond a typical 70's TV movie of the week. Her main antagonist is a corrupt male orderly (Bo Hopkins) who pressures her for sex. Her fellow inmates, meanwhile, include a young Robert England and an (apparently genuinely) pregnant Patti D'Arbanville.

A lot of stuff in this movie seems rather preposterous today, but back in the 70's perhaps not so much. This movie kind of reminded me of the the contemporary theatrical film "Human Experiments" and the TV movie "Nightmare in Badham County". Dianne Hull was one of those very cute 70's actresses who appeared in a few things and then pretty much vanished into oblivion. This is perhaps her most memorable role aside from "Girls on the Road" (where she'd played a hitch-hiking teenager who almost has sex with "Papa Walton"). Her full-frontal nude scenes are about the only thing that separate this from a tame TV movie, but she does give a pretty good performance. And it's always fun to watch Bo Hopkins play a redneck villain even if he's not quite as memorable as he is in "White Lightning" and .

This is probably not a movie that's going to make a deep impression on anybody, but it's entertaining enough I guess.

Its obvious that some big wigs, or maybe small wigs, decided that because One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest was popular and that Disco was still flapping its huge collars and flares on the dancefloor, combining the two would be a hit. Well it wasn't.

I saw that because this only ended up on my radar after watching old Siskel and Ebert reviews, watching old trailers and somehow this entered my consciousness. The next day it pops up on Talking Pictures TV, so it would have been rude not to... The story is about a disco dancing student who ends up ingesting some drug which ends up with her being sectioned. The rest of the movie is her trying to prove her sanity, while being abused by various members of staff. This is many peoples idea of hell. And what I can tell you is that this is based on fact. A bunch of psychologists decided to do an experiment by pretending to be crazy in order to get sectioned. They were and nobody believed their stories about being psychologists. You can look this up.

So with a solid premise and with psychiatric input to the film, its strange that "the crazies" act pretty normal. I suppose real looking mental health patients aren't for show. What is surprising is the quality of the cast. There are so many faces that went on to be so well known in the following decade its a wonder this isn't more widely known.

The film does work in terms of engagement however and the story is well paced and executed. It obviously has some similarities to women in prison movies, but it doesn't really have the same sleaze or nudity. It is basically a disco-melodrama version of Cuckoos nest, without the same emotional punch. Although it does have a satisfying conclusion.

The lovely and appealing Dianne Hull ("Aloha, Bobby and Rose") plays Kelly McIntyre, a college student and disco dancer who suffers seizures on the dance floor one night. It turns out that she's been the victim of strychnine poisoning, but too many authority figures think she's delusional and suicidal, prompting them to place her in the psychiatric ward - the fifth floor of the tile - of the hospital. She has a very hard time convincing people that she's quite sane, and avoiding the lecherous paws of ultra-creepy orderly Carl (Bo Hopkins, "The Wild Bunch").

This is a reasonably entertaining exploitation-drama, somewhat forgotten over time, that should be of interest to fans of the genre. Purporting to be "based on" a true story, it's got an effectively sordid premise, complete with some nastiness and nudity along the way. It takes Kelly's tale seriously, allowing us to build sufficient sympathy for her as well as for some of her fellow inmates. It does have some genuine pathos going for it; Patti D'Arbanville plays a pregnant inmate named Cathy afraid of having her baby taken away, and Sharon Farrell (in a standout performance) is the frail and vulnerable Melanie; ones' heart just goes out to this poor, messed-up woman.

The film does a great job of really having you hate the Carl character. This is one of Hopkins' best roles and performances, and you keep waiting for this person to get some sort of comeuppance. Other roadblocks in Kelly's way include an administrator (guest star Mel Ferrer) and a head nurse (Julie Adams), who tend to dismiss Kelly and her plight.

The quirky characters are a highlight, enacted by a variety of familiar faces: Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund (his entrance has him pretending to be a doctor), Anthony James (the antagonist in director Howard Avedis' "The Teacher") as the hostile Derrick, Earl Boen ("The Terminator") as the nerdy Phil, and Alice "Large Marge" Nunn as Emma. Pay close attention and you'll spot Michael Berryman ("The Hills Have Eyes" '77) as another inmate; however, Tracey Walter ("Repo Man") is harder to spot. Director Avedis and his actress wife Marlene Schmidt, who came up with the screen story, have small roles in the film.

Overall, this is engaging trash, that is more vivid than one might see in a TV movie treatment of such material.

Seven out of 10.

'Strong supporting cast. Dianne Hull is underrated in this movie. The storyline gets a little weak towards the end when the director has to tie up all the lose ends. The ending scene pretty much wipes away most of the good acting in this film. The shock treatment scene wasn't as brutal, or dramatic as it could have been. The scenery and locations for the time were an execellent choice. If you find yourself looking to pick up an extra movie for the weekend and want something not so light or heavy, rent this. Worth the two bucks.