Hysteria

HYSTERIA has to be one of the dumbest and most incomprehensible films I've sat through in a while, a real patience-tester with nary a plotline in sight. It's another asylum film in which lead Michael Maloney enters the scene only to discover - unsurprisingly - that the doctors are just as mad as the patients. There's some guff about mind control and the like, but it's all an excuse for overacting, bizarre behaviour and wall-to-wall female nudity, with so much of the latter that this feels like a skin flick. Pity poor old Patrick McGoohan, appearing here in his last film, for making such a lapse of judgement. The biggest surprise is that the director Rene Daalder previously made one of my all-time favourites, MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH, back in the 1970s.