The Happiness Cage

soldiers with facial hair? With a name like "The Mind Snatchers", I naturally assumed this was a film about space aliens abducting and scrambling the brains of folks. However, the film has absolutely nothing to do with this but is instead a slightly paranoid but thought-provoking film about psychiatric ethics.

The film begins with a VERY obnoxious and angry soldier, Pvt. Reese (Christopher Walken) bullying and mistreating everyone. He's soon arrested by the military police and incarcerated for psychiatric tests to determine what his issues are. They diagnose him with a personality disorder (no duh!) and schizophrenia--and, without his permission, they ship him off to a very strange hospital where there appear to be only three patients. One is SERIOUSLY disturbed and a total mess. Another (Ronny Cox) is a sex offender. And, the third is Reese. What is this all about? No one tells Reese and he's left to wonder. And, through the course of the film, it becomes more and more apparent that the military is planning on doing some sort of insidious mind-control experiment on them!

Despite a low budget and that the film is inexplicably set in Germany (I think this was due to funding), the movie has a very compelling script and has a lot of interesting things to say about abuses within psychiatry where, it seems, the end does justify the means. A very good and unusual film to say the least--and an interesting early Walken role. Well worth seeing, though I doubt if the average person would enjoy this. Me, with my background in psychology, I loved it and thought it brought up some very interesting concerns.

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.

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.

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.

THE MIND SNATCHERS is about mind control, a government conspiracy, and an experiment gone wrong. In spite of these intriguing elements, this movie is painfully slow. This makes it feel days long instead of its actual 90 minute running time.

Watching it, it's clear that this would have made an excellent short film or anthology film segment. As it stands, it has a brain-scorching-ly padded midsection sandwiched between a decent beginning and a perfectly downbeat finale.

On the upside, Christopher Walken plays his character, Reese, with his soon-to-be signature, unforced quirkiness. In retrospect, it seems obvious that his future would include roles in THE DEER HUNTER and THE DEAD ZONE.

Unfortunately, he's the only bright spot in this movie. That is, unless you count a young Ronny Cox as Reese's unhinged hillbilly roommate...