I had a "What the hell did I just watch?!" experience with this movie, and I mean that in a good way - a real buried treasure. This one is based on a play and as a result the early dialogue scenes make it seem like the previous 25 years of screen writing technique had not occurred - lots of snappy one-on-one character dialogue and hearty expositions. It's not as bad as it sounds though; it's actually pretty cool, and soon enough it goes over the edge, with subtext run amuck. This is an allegory about the colluding interests of the military and psychiatric establishments - a hardcore, polemical one. Christopher Walken, young like crazy, is the Angry Young Man in the Wild One/Jailhouse Rock tradition, except he gets sent to a military hospital where they f*ck around with monkeys and put electrodes in GIs heads to test fancy shock machines. The twist is that the psychiatrist refuses to operate without consent - so he goads consent out of the patients by the most devious, predatory means - and then gets THEM to push the button. At the end Walken is paraded before the media in a military uniform, standing on a stage with the doctor and the general, and he offers completely vacuous, completely familiar answers to the usual questions - but before each answer, they have to push the button. The TV was off for ten minutes before I realized - IT DOESN'T TELL US WHO'S PUSHING THE BUTTON. That about sums it up, doesn't it? Another coup: when the old-maid nurse is about to be raped by the hyperactive Ronny Cox, she startlingly yells, "You don't love me because I'm fat!!!" There's a lot of detail here. The soundtrack - by Phil Ramone, Billy Joel's producer and the guy the Ramones ripped their name off from - is completely insane, at times it sounds like a cross between Philip Glass and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. My only question is, were any animals harmed during the making of this picture? Those are some stressed-out monkeys. Finally: be advised that Cox's self-buttoning scene is f*cking disturbing, even if it is justified rhetorically.
Review of The Mind Snatchers
