Human Experiments (1979)

Just perfect...

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Country singer Rachel Foster (Linda Haynes) is undoubtedly the unluckiest person alive as she stumbles upon a young kid who has just slaughtered his family. She shoots the kid (he goes into a coma), resulting in a life sentence after the crooked Sheriff pins all the murders on her. But this is no ordinary prison as the Warden (Mercedes Shirley) and Dr. Kline (Geoffrey Lewis) are conducting bizarre behavioral experiments on their charges. My Aldo Ray mini-marathon continues with this sleazy exploitation flick. Ray pops up in the first 15 minutes as a lecherous bar owner who tries to get it on with our lead. There are some memorable bits in this and, on a whole, it is a pretty solid WIP entry with a few nice twists. Lewis does a great job as the creepy doctor and their is a nice supporting role from Ellen Travolta. Haynes is an attractive lead and isn't afraid to deliver the genre required nudity. The only odd thing is the filmmakers having her sing to terrible vocals supplied by someone else. The film's oddity highlight though is the Warden booking the band Satan & The Lucifers to perform for her inmates. Director Gregory Goodell excels in the film's last third where Foster's nightmares come to life to haunt her. Sadly, he went on to Lifetime movies exclusively after this.

This movie is most famous for having been banned in Britain during the "video nasty" scare of the early 80's. I can only suppose the idiots mistook it for a Nazi death camp exploitation flick, like the similarly titled "S.S. Experiment Camp", because it's really not all that shocking or offensive. 70's actress Linda Haynes plays a country singer. Haynes was very cute and sexy, but she was a TERRIBLE singer, which might explain why her character only gets booked by horny hicks at honky-tonk bars out in the middle of nowhere. While driving back from one of these gigs, her car breaks down. She goes to a farmhouse to use the phone, only to discover that a pre-teen boy living there has slaughtered his entire family with a shotgun. She shoots the homicidal tyke in self-defense and ends up being blamed for all the murders.The movie for awhile turns into a rural WIP movie like "Jackson County Jail"--there is a "de-lousing" and shower scene, some aborted lesbianism, and a brief cat fight--but not as much as usual in a WIP film (gratefully, perhaps since all the other prisoners are generally unattractive). But this particular prison also has a bent psychiatric doctor played by Geoffrey Lewis (side-kick to Clint Eastwood and the father of Juliette Lewis). He has some crackpot therapy where he breaks the worst offenders down to the level of infants, where they're clutching teddy bears and sucking their thumbs, and then he tries to "rebuild" them as respectable citizens. So far, however, all his "experiments" have gone horribly awry.The scenes of the prison authorities breaking the Hayne's characters will are pretty effective--the crackpot shrink is also a frustrated entomologist, so at one point they pour disgusting insects all over her, and they do other stuff like stage mock executions and try to convince her she's going insane. None of this rises much above the level of a TV movie though, and it hardly justifies this movie's "nasty" status. The image of grown women reduced to infantilism is kind of disturbing, but if this were a Jess Franco or European WIP film, they probably would have tried to make this sexy somehow, which would have been far more disturbing.The ending is REALLY stupid, but I didn't find this movie boring generally speaking. And it certainly didn't deserve the "nasty" treatment it got from the British censors.

The most gnawing thing about this movie is the incredible rock band that plays for the inmates, yet they seem to have never existed beyond the movie. When trying to track the band members, one only gets dead ends, yet they sound like a fusion of the old Journey with a little r& b thrown in. Lounge act they are not, and had to have worked at getting this gig together for the movie. Maybe when this DVD comes out, we will finally get the lowdown on who they were, and if they ever did produce an album. This isn't a spoiler, it's a teaser. There is a wealth of character actor talent here that is both campy and serious in dialog. Linda Haynes is the perfect victim who doesn't give up until the very end, which is quite interesting and ties into the beginning in a bizarre way.

****Possible Spoilers****This is a step up from this producers previous efforts and although this film begins well it doesn't follow through. Linda Haynes is excellent as a singer who travels from town to town playing one night gigs as a singer/songwriter. She rebuffs advances from the local bar-owner and he responds by paying her short of the money agreed. As his brother is the town sheriff she finds she is in no position to argue. Driving away the next day she swerves to avoid someone who runs out in front of her car - although it would have helped if she had not been trying to write sheet music while driving! She gets out of the car and looks for the casualty but can't see anyone so she wanders up to a nearby house to use the phone and this is where she gets into really big trouble because she walks into the middle of a massacre. Up until now the film has been suspenseful and the characters interesting but after a quick voice over narration we find Linda committed to life imprisonment in a women's prison. This is where credibility and interest end however as the prison is presided over by a Warden and Psycho - psychiatrist who are developing new methods of rehabilitation by driving inmates out of their mind and reverting them back to their childhood so they can be brought up as nice, decent people instead of criminals. The whole scenario then becomes ludicrous and unbelievable and more's the pity after such a good beginning. There are a couple of scenes which will shock you but not in a bloody or violent way and both are in the first part of the movie. You may find the scenes with the bugs unpleasant in the second half of the film although the photography is so dark it's difficult to see them properly anyway. Linda Haynes is memorable in this role, she is convincing mainly because as a singer she is only average and she doesn't have the prettiest looks which is exactly what this role demands. Her acting is believable and she does have a beautiful body which the film makers exploit in a couple of scenes although the movie veers towards their previous hardcore efforts with an unnecessary (but thankfully curtailed) masturbation scene.