The best Gregory Hlady’s science fiction movies

Legendary actor Patrick McGoohan turns his famous character from THE PRISONER upside down as the psychiatrist in charge of an insane asylum. He has connected his inmates into a group mind where they share each other's psychoses, dreams and sexuality with all the scary and titillating implications imaginable! Like his highly acclaimed cult classic MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH, director Rene Daalders provocative excursion into sci fi-horror filmmaking looks at first glance like a classic grindhouse movie, but it is up to much more. In addition to its operatic mayhem, HYSTERIA is a mind-expanding reflection on individual vs. group consciousness, power, control, and freedom.

This film is of interest primarily because it contains within it the entire surviving footage of an unfinished 1974 film by the same director, Slave of Love, which was successfully remade shortly thereafter by another director, Nikita Mikhalkov.The "cover" story is about a woman (Jeanne Moreau) newly released from prison camps in the 1940s back into Russian society, who finds that there is no place for her in the world she has come back to. However, this painterly film is so filled with striking and surreal imagery that it would be misleading to say that the story is of any great importance in relation to that.