Disturbed (1990)

Please don't spend money on this.

People are voting emotionally.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The acting in this movie is really good.

One night at the Bergen Field Mental Health Facility, debauched Dr. Derrek Russell (Malcolm McDowell) sneaks into the room of one of his disturbed female patients and brutally rapes her. In the daytime, she jumps to her death in the presence of visitors, including a ten year-old girl. Now the movie fast forwards ten years to the present of 1990. A new patient, physically attractive – Sandy Ramirez (Pamela Gidley) – has arrived. Supposedly a psychometric paranoid and promiscuous, Sandy is hostile to her surroundings. One evening Russell awakens her and drags her out of bed. In a darkened room he forcefully administers penicillin to Sandy, even though she is listed as allergic. His intent is rape. When assistant Michael Kahn (Geoffrey Lewis) enters the room, he seems shocked at first. But then administers another dose of penicillin to Sandy, saying that if you want to kill her ensure that she gets enough. The plan is to bury Sandy before morning and pretend that she escaped from the facility.At breakfast time, comatose Sandy is not found in her bed. Frantic searches are fruitless. Dr. Russell does spot her, or thinks he spots her, alive on a rooftop looking at him. When he tries to approach her, she disappears. Then strange events begin to happen as the dissolute doctor's mental facilities gradually deteriorate. He even diagnoses himself suffering from a form of cryptomnesia accompanied by paranoid hysteria and hallucinations. SPOILER: What has happened is this: Sandy was the ten year-old daughter of the woman who killed herself at the beginning of the movie. As Sandy wanted revenge, she haunted the depraved doctor with a series of unnerving events until he himself became a lunatic. Malcolm, disgusted with the Russell's general behavior, was Sandy's accomplice all along!Directed by Charles Winkler, the film really is not a horror flick. But the tone shifts from serious to comedy to incredulous. Perhaps a better classification might be a florid thriller, as film critic Leonard Maltin put it. At the end of the movie before the credits, as nurse Sandy – with the huge needle the size of a knife – approaches Russell in his padded cell, you can clearly hear the director say "Cut it!" The eerie music by Steven Scott Smalley is effective.

You might want to avoid reading the plot description of "Disturbed" here on IMDb, as the sole one available rather bluntly gives away the essential plot twist of the film's final five minutes. Admittedly this denouement isn't particularly hard to predict, but still … it kind of spoils the fun factor. "Disturbed" is an overlooked but vivid and entertaining enough psycho- thriller feature from the early 90's. The plot and setting are overly familiar, but the film nevertheless manages to keep you glued to the screen for an hour and a half. This is mostly thanks to a handful of truly atmospheric sequences and the more than adequate acting performances from the ensemble cast. "Disturbed" stars B-movie favorite Malcolm McDowell in his accustomed role of dangerous doctor, but he receives excellent support from multiple recognizable faces in the roles of his mental patients. There's Geoffrey Lewis ("The Devil's Rejects", "The Lawnmower Man"), Irwin Keyes ("House of 1.000 Corpses", "Chained Heat"), Clint Howard ("EvilSpeak", "Ticks"), Emerson Bixby ("Deep End") and even that creepy little guy who played all the Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". The film is already worth checking out if only to see all these names star as loonies! McDowell is the widely respected Dr. Derrick Russell, brilliant psychiatrist and owner of an eminent mental clinic. He also has the bad habit, however, of occasionally sneaking into the rooms of his female patients to drug and rape them. When he tries to rape the newly arrived patient Sandy Ramirez, she accidentally dies from an allergic reaction to the drugs. With the help of another patient, Dr. Russell develops an evil plan, but then the next morning the body appears to be vanished. Strange things begin to occur after that, and Dr. Russell is wondering if he isn't degenerating into a state of madness himself. "Disturbed" is a derivative and predictable thriller, but it's fairly uplifted thanks to McDowell's presence and thanks to the imaginative cinematography. The relatively unknown director Charles Winkler (son of producer Irwin Winkler) makes the asylum extra sinister and its inhabitants extra morbid through grim camera angles and eerie sounds of laughter, creaking doors, etc

I first saw this film a few years ago when I was viewing Dom d Louise's early works, and became interested in other actors who had once had their names written in the stars, but were now little more than B-vehicle and up-staged stars of bad sit-coms.Malcolm, of course, was one of the first to make the leap from a rather desperate film career to mediocre sit-com, and has since been followed by such lights as: Cybil Shepherd (Cybil), Joan Cusak (Joan), Bette Midler (Bette), and Courtney Cox (Friends).I hadn't realised this was his first film sporting the future-villain hair-style, but this only adds to the value of my ex-rental copy of the film.Much has been said of the camera work in this film, as a sort of a chart of a man's descent into madness, but few people mention the shot that, I feel, is the key to the entire film. When one of the patients exposes himself to a nurse, we get a - filmically - rare penis POV. I have never seen such a thing attempted in a movie, and if you add this to the tremendous whirling tracking-shots, you end up with a film that I think proves beyond doubt that Scorsese owes more to Winkler than he dares reveal.Brilliant, and standing up to multiple viewings, I have seen it several times, and truly covet my copy of this obscure American classic.BTW, watch out for the genuinely "disturbing" scene, after the closing credits, where Malcolm "interferes" with the camera, raising all sorts of philosophical questions on the nature of madness, the truth of film, and Crossing The Line (on several levels). Once again, Brilliant!

A moderately amusing thriller with a comic edge. The (little known) director often uses distorted camera angles to portray the hero's slow "degeneration into a state of madness" (that's how he describes his condition at one point) and the script is clever enough to keep you guessing and wondering whether Malcolm McDowell (in a great performance that gives class to the production) is simply having "vivid" hallucinations or is driven to insanity by someone else. There are some impressively shot scenes in this movie, but it is marred by an inconclusive ending, which doesn't fully resolve the plot. (**)