Human Experiments

This movie is most famous for having been banned in Britain during the "video nasty" scare of the early 80's. I can only suppose the idiots mistook it for a Nazi death camp exploitation flick, like the similarly titled "S.S. Experiment Camp", because it's really not all that shocking or offensive. 70's actress Linda Haynes plays a country singer. Haynes was very cute and sexy, but she was a TERRIBLE singer, which might explain why her character only gets booked by horny hicks at honky-tonk bars out in the middle of nowhere. While driving back from one of these gigs, her car breaks down. She goes to a farmhouse to use the phone, only to discover that a pre-teen boy living there has slaughtered his entire family with a shotgun. She shoots the homicidal tyke in self-defense and ends up being blamed for all the murders.

The movie for awhile turns into a rural WIP movie like "Jackson County Jail"--there is a "de-lousing" and shower scene, some aborted lesbianism, and a brief cat fight--but not as much as usual in a WIP film (gratefully, perhaps since all the other prisoners are generally unattractive). But this particular prison also has a bent psychiatric doctor played by Geoffrey Lewis (side-kick to Clint Eastwood and the father of Juliette Lewis). He has some crackpot therapy where he breaks the worst offenders down to the level of infants, where they're clutching teddy bears and sucking their thumbs, and then he tries to "rebuild" them as respectable citizens. So far, however, all his "experiments" have gone horribly awry.

The scenes of the prison authorities breaking the Hayne's characters will are pretty effective--the crackpot shrink is also a frustrated entomologist, so at one point they pour disgusting insects all over her, and they do other stuff like stage mock executions and try to convince her she's going insane. None of this rises much above the level of a TV movie though, and it hardly justifies this movie's "nasty" status. The image of grown women reduced to infantilism is kind of disturbing, but if this were a Jess Franco or European WIP film, they probably would have tried to make this sexy somehow, which would have been far more disturbing.

The ending is REALLY stupid, but I didn't find this movie boring generally speaking. And it certainly didn't deserve the "nasty" treatment it got from the British censors.

I like hardcore horror, but this banned film (sometimes marketed as a women in prison movie) is not very interesting and may be Scientologist propaganda.

Shocker scenes include the discovery of a massacred family and the full frontal nude spraying of inmates. Otherwise I found little of interest other than a scene involving the bloody and semi-topless lead covered in real live bugs, many of which were huge and bizarre.

Is the main character being psychologically tormented by an evil doctor or is she seeing things that are not there? I didn't really care, but it's all resolved at the end. Quite a far fetched and annoying end at that.

A women's prison doctor with a thing for creepy crawlies torments an innocent inmate. The main actors here all had careers beyond grindhouse, so the acting is better than most. I found the script unclear at points, and pointlessly interrupted three times by musical numbers, twice to showcase the leading lady's vocal skills--not bad, but out of place here--and somebody must have owed something to the band that plays a gratuitous concert for the ladies, apropos of nothing.. For a women's prison movie they certainly didn't take much advantage of the obvious opportunities for sexploitation. Prisoners are stripped, of course, but they all abide by the prohibition of physical interaction as barked to them by the matron over the loudspeaker. And it's even coitus interruptus alone as, just as our gal's about to stick her hand in her panties, it's lights on for a surprise rollcall. Talk about torture by deprivation! Add up the plus and minuses and you come up with something middling.

Anyone who has waded through the infamous video nasty list will no doubt come to the conclusion that an alarming number of the films really have little to no shock content whatsoever. Human Experiments is a perfect example of this. It's really extremely difficult working out what exactly it was that the British censors objected to here. Maybe they just chucked every woman in prison flick onto the list irrespective of substance? Hard to say but there truly is no troubling content in this film. And that is a real shame because there isn't an awful lot in this film of any real interest. Its video nasty status is clearly its only real selling point so you may feel a little short changed with this one.

Its story has a female country and western singer wrongly accused of slaughtering a family and sent to a correctional facility where she is subjected to experimental aversion therapy techniques.

It starts quite well but once we reach the prison things start to become really quite uneventful. For a woman in prison flick there is a very low level of sexploitation content. The 'human experiments' of the title are somewhat underwhelming to say the least. The main shock scene is certainly the part where the heroine is covered in insects and spiders. I personally found that somewhat disturbing so fair enough on that score. This scene comes late in the movie and it does have to be said that in the latter 20 minutes or so things do pick up a bit. Better late than never I suppose. It ends with a strange and senseless ending. In the final analysis, this isn't very good but it's offbeat enough to bring it up to the level of mediocre.

Under-rated 70s actress Linda Haynes ("Coffy", "Rolling Thunder") gets top billing in this so-so W.I.P. (Women In Prison, for those not in the know) exploitation-thriller. She's lovely and appealing, and is a sympathetic character in this tale of an aspiring young singer-songwriter who ends up jailed for multiple murders (due to largely circumstantial evidence). The place she gets sent to is one of those typical hellholes common to cinema, and there the nefarious prison shrink (top character actor Geoffrey Lewis, "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"), who's in cahoots with the warden (Mercedes Shirley), conducts bizarre "rehabilitation" experiments.

"Human Experiments" is stacked with cliches / expectations of the genre, such as the standard leering redneck types (like the hotel & saloon owner Aldo Ray ("Pat & Mike")), the appreciated birthday-suit shots, lesbianism, a catfight, and the overwhelmingly seedy environments. It's not exactly hard to feel bad for Rachel and disgusted with the slimy Dr. Kline. There is a little bit of gore, as well, and director Gregory Goodell capitalizes on peoples' aversion to insects and arachnids by inundating poor Ms. Haynes with a variety of creepy-crawlies. She gets put through the ringer, which might account for "Human Experiments" ending up on the notorious "Video Nasties" list.

Overall, the movie is reasonably entertaining, although this viewer would be lying if he said that very much of interest ever happens. At least the evil shrink Dr. Kline provides a fresh spin on a genre that had flourished throughout the 1970s. The ending provides some satisfaction, but is not really well-thought-out.

The better-than-average cast does help, complete with appearances by the likes of Ellen Travolta (Johns' older sister), Jackie Coogan ('The Addams Family'), Lurene Tuttle ("Psycho"), Darlene Craviotto ("I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"), and Marie O'Henry ("Three the Hard Way").

"Human Experiments" is absurd, amusing, and in general a hoot, if too tame for hardcore exploitation lovers.

Six out of 10.