Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Cortechba Overrated

Manthast Absolutely amazing

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

JohnHowardReid Despite the almost universal thumbs-down on this movie from professional critics, I think that thriller fans will find it reasonably entertaining. Admittedly, the movie has faults, but I don't blame the script so much as the direction. True, the plot strands and twists are very familiar. Indeed, "hackneyed" might be a better term. And some of the dialog doesn't ring true. But all told, I think Boehm has penned a reasonably exciting and suspenseful script, peopled with reasonably interesting characters and moving at a fairly fast pace. Unfortunately, the script's effectiveness has been whittled down by slack and inefficient direction. Worse still, the version I saw was at times almost impossible to follow due to jump cuts and lack of continuity. And where it is not glaringly inept, the direction is at best routine. Lauren Bacall has a role in which she would seem to be ideally cast, but she muffs it and is content to walk though the film just reciting her lines. Her close-ups are a disaster. She looks haggard. Whitman plays the hero with his customary competence, but the real acting high points are left to Roddy McDowall. Ossie Davis is also a stand-out. Carol Lynley is effective in a typical role.

sol ***SPOILERS*** It's when his boss the eccentric and wealthy Mrs. Amelia Townsend, Betrice Grenough, started messing with his beloved plants that her Gardner all around handy man, as well as chauffeur, the not so stable Martin Ashley, Roddy McDowell, ended up decapitating her with a pair of garden shears. Turning himself into the police and not defending his murderous action Ashley is later declared insane and sent to a mental institution until he's deemed to be normal by a battery of court appointed psychiatrists.It's the late Mrs. Townsend's good friend millionaire Harley Manning, Judson Laire, who smelled a rat in her murderer Martin Ashley getting off so easy and that rat was non other then Ashley's court appointed psychologist Dr. Edwina Beighley, Lauren Bacall. It was Dr. Beighley's testimony on Ashley's behalf that save him, by Ashley being committed into Dr. Beighley's mental institution, from either the San Quentin gas chamber or a life sentence behind bars. Feeling that there's something more to Dr. Beighley's concern in keeping Ashley in her mental institution then just curing him! Manning gives $10,000.00 to struggling actor Dale Nelson, Stuart Whitman, so he could fake his way, by acting crazy, into Dr. Beighley's "funny farm" as well as learning all about plants and flowers in order to get close to the flower and plant lover Martin Ashley! And thus find out what kind of relationship he had with Dr. Beighley in order for her to be so good to him! And as Nelson was soon to find out it had nothing to do with romance. It did in fact have a lot to do with the late Mrs. Townsend's missing million dollars!Much like the Samuel Fuller 1963 classic "Shock Corridor" the film "Shock Treatment" has to do with a man going undercover in a mental institution to get to the truth about a crime that was committed by one of its inmates. And at the same time almost ending up losing his mind in doing so! Nelson tries to get close to Ashley by claiming to be a "flower child" like himself but Ashley instinctively knows that he's only putting him on and refuses to play along with him. It's in fact the very shrewd and manipulative Dr. Beighley who finally gets Ashley to open up, with him spending 31 hours on the coach being psychoanalyzed by her, and tell her what she so desperately want's to know. Where Mrs. Townsend's million is!***SPOILERS*** Nelson is later found out by Dr. Beighley to have been "planted" in her mental institution by her sworn enemy Haley Manning who's out to have her license revoked for unethical and unprofessional conduct. Being put under shock treatment and psychotic drugs Nelson somehow is able to escape from Dr. Beighley institution only to find out that the very person who can prove his innocence in being normal, not psychotic, Haley Manning had just died! This sets the audience up for the shocking surprise at the end of the film in where the buried million, dug up by both Ashley & Dr.Beighley, was hidden! Yes it was there all right just like Ashley said it would be but the condition that it was in was quite another matter!

blanche-2 Stuart Whitman is a money-hungry actor who is hired to fake insanity in order to find $1 million in "Shock Treatment." The film also stars Lauren Bacall, Roddy McDowell, Carol Lynley, and Ossie Davis. When asked about this film, Lauren Bacall commented, "You have no idea what Roddy and I went through making that movie." I don't, and frankly, it's a little hard to tell what the problems were from the filming. It seemed pretty straightforward. She plays a doctor who would have found a good home on Josef Mengele's staff. McDowell is a patient in the asylum who killed his wealthy boss and then supposedly burned her money. No one believes that, and Whitman is hired to find out where he hid it.It turns out, he's not the only one interested, and things become pretty dangerous for him. The movie seems to meander along, and then becomes rather exciting toward the end. It was directed and filmed in an uninteresting way, so it's not as good as it could have been.

jaxla SHOCK TREATMENT has a delicious hook: an actor is hired to impersonate a lunatic so he can be put in an institution and become friends with a lunatic killer who just happens to know where a lot of money is hidden. Of course, there are all sorts of complications, primarily head psychiatrist Lauren Bacall, who also has her eye on the money and figures out the actor's game. Not a bad set up, but the script is full of holes and lame dialogue and the direction is lackluster. But Bacall, as a precursor to Nurse Ratched, is a hoot as the villain and gets to administer shock treatment to the actor (Stuart Whitman) to try to break him! The ending isn't bad either, a couple of reversals and a nice battle with a pitch fork. This is one to watch with one eye closed on a rainy afternoon, which is just about how I caught in on Fox Movie Channel. In her autobiography, Bacall refers to the film as "truly tacky." She's right on target, both in her performance and her critique!