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Young and ambitious newspaper reporter Johnny Barrett will pay any price for success. Sometimes, the price can be too high... With the help of his editor and a leading psychologist, Johnny feigns insanity inorder to get into an asylum where a brutal murder is witnessed by three patients. With the intention of uncovering the murderer and pulling the scoop of the year, Johnny becomes an inmate and gets drawn into the unsable mind of those who witnessed the murder. Haunted by his own paranoia and subjecting himself to rigorous shock-treatment, Johnny finds that his act is becoming more of a horrifying reality. With time against him, Johnny's obsession to solve the crime becomes an absolute necessity, as the darkness of his mind begins to consume his soul. Sam Fuller, auteur director/writer and unheralded master of American film noir, here reworks the genre asylum flick, using the psych ward as a metaphor for America's slide into dystopia. Featuring electro-shock therapy, cannibalistic nymphomaniacs and the ravings of sundry opera-singing psychos, juvenile nuclear physicists and black white supremists, this B-movie psychodrama about a Pulitzer-prize seeking journalist who commits himself to a mental ward in an effort to crack an unsolved murder case- and win the Pulitzer Prize- is a dark tale of descent into madness.
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