The Happiness Cage

This low key drama is about medical experiments in the American military where a form of mind control is being developed which involves brain washing of violent individuals to make them 'good'. An unruly young soldier is sent to the facility where these techniques are being developed for conditioning.

The most significant thing about The Mind Snatchers is that it features a young Christopher Walken in an early starring role. He is certainly the best thing about the film. His intensity is evident at this early stage and he carries the movie really. While the plot-line has some definite similarities to A Clockwork Orange, whose success I am sure led to this stage play being filmed, it is much less cinematic and pretty under-stated. It's a little too stage-bound for its own good to be honest and a little bit bland overall. It's a shame because there is certainly the basis of something quite good here but the uninspired direction means that it is not entirely successful. Its low budget probably restricts it in some ways but I have seen other similarly cheap sci-fi films from the 70's that engage the viewer more. Still, it's interesting enough for a watch and Walken is very good. It also features Ronny Cox from Deliverance as a sex offending inmate in line for corrective surgery.

A young Christopher Walken brings his typically dynamic presence to this low key drama with a touch of sci-fi. He plays Private James Reese, an aggressive young soldier stationed in Germany who gets in trouble one too many times to suit his superiors. So they ship him off to a hospital in the country where Dr. Frederick (Joss Ackland), the man in charge, has come up with an experimental way to suppress hostile behaviour. Reese doesn't trust Frederick, and is suspicious of the whole set-up and location. The Army, represented by a Major (Ralph Meeker), is overseeing the whole thing and of course doesn't want anything jeopardizing their efforts.

Those new to this film, such as this viewer, may be caught a little off guard with the nature of this film, which the advertising tries to sell as a horror movie. Well, there's some scary stuff in this story (based on the play by Dennis Reardon), but this is definitely not a horror movie in the traditional sense. It's quite deliberate in its pacing, and is very talky, so it may test the patience of some audience members. Still, it's often amusing, and interesting. A lot of the running time is devoted to portraying the evolving relationship between Reese and his live wire fellow patient Boford Miles (an incredible, standout performance by Ronny Cox). Miles is a very troubled individual, as we see from the kinds of things that he gets up to. It's a saddening moment for the character when he finally relents to being subjected to the experimental procedure, and you feel quite bad for him.

Ultimately, the plight of these characters makes for fairly compelling material. The actors are all wonderful; Walkens' trademark personality shines through at some points, although he also gets a chance to do some really serious acting, in what was one of his earliest movie roles. Cox (who was also a relative newcomer to film, having made "Deliverance" previously) is excellent and he and Walken work well together. Ackland and Meeker are both solid as the well-meaning and not so well-meaning antagonists, character actor Marco St. John has a lively role as a jovial orderly, and Bette Henritze is touching as kindly nurse Anna Kraus.

This may not be anything truly special, necessarily, but it's still potent and involving entertainment and fans of Walken and Cox will almost certainly want to give it a look.

Seven out of 10.

Based on a play "The Happiness Cage" by Dennis Reardon

A German scientist works on a way of quelling overly aggressive soldiers by developing implants that directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain.

Joss Ackland did an excellent portrait of Dr. Fredrick our German scientist. You may remember him as C. S. Lewis in "Shadow Lands" (1985).

The movie has a constantly annoying background musical theme that distracts from this movie that feels more like a play. There is even a long Ayn Rand type speech on the morality of electrodes.

Using subtitles can correct for occasional Mumbling.

The advantage of the DVD is that the picture is a lot clearer and brighter without those annoying dark spots that you have to guess what is happening.

I wish they had cut a lot more of this dialogue. I've been imagining this on a stage in a theater and it would be wonderful. With all of this talking, they would create a world and it would have ups and downs and it would work.

That doesn't translate to film. You don't have to create a world or an atmosphere. The camera can photograph a huge empty room in a mental hospital and you don't have to tell us what it feels like. The starkness of the setting is already pretty overwhelming. They are trapped. This is horrifying.

I grew up in the 70s so I'm familiar with this weird weak neurotic snarky tone that everyone has. It was a pretty awful time to live. People were not nice. Negativity was coolness, and everybody just wanted to drop out and let go of everything.

I was really not liking Christopher Walken in the first few minutes but I relaxed and decided to go with it. And here he is an absolutely wonderful actor doing the best with this material. And a lot of his works that we all know about now as an actor show up here. It might be worth watching just to see Christopher walken.

Interesting but hardly original drama with sci-fi leanings – though not quite the "horror"/"chiller" described by the ads! – involving the brain-washing of violence-prone subjects by the system (which must have seemed particularly trenchant at the time of the Vietnam war).

At this juncture, however, the movie feels quite dated – if reasonably intelligent and compelling nonetheless. Being also relentlessly talky (not surprising, given its stage origins) and low-key in nature, there's a conspicuous lack of cinematic inventiveness – which doesn't really allow for a sensible comparison with Stanley Kubrick's stylized treatment of the same theme in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)! Still, it has some undeniably powerful moments – and the small cast is impressive: Christopher Walken (relatively inexperienced for this type of demanding role, but quite good in his Method approach to it); Joss Ackland (as the requisite mad scientist); Ralph Meeker (as the equally inevitable, and callous, military overseer); and Ronny Cox (as a fellow inmate of Walken's who, after much soul-searching, willingly submits to the dehumanizing experiment).

Incidentally, the play was filmed under its original title – THE HAPPINESS CAGE – but this got changed (in case it was mistaken for an ode to hippiedom) first to the sci-fi friendly and, in retrospect, more appropriate THE MIND SNATCHERS and eventually to the horror-oriented (and, consequently, wholly misleading) THE DEMON WITHIN!