State of Hysteria in Montana

STATE OF MIND (1992)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

From the late night school of preternatural David Lynch weirdness, "State of Mind" is an abhorrent mess. It has little to recommend it, aside from featuring actors like Lisa Gaye (in a top-billing role for once), Fred Williamson, Jill Schoelen, among others. It's so jumbled, incoherent and maddeningly confused from one scene to the next that I am not sure there is much to make of it. The filmmakers themselves don't even like the film and find it just as confusing. What does that tell you?

A strange, forlorn woman named Barbara (Manouk van der Meulen), a former nurse, is living in Montana in a house that looks more like a castle that Boris Karloff might have lived in. She takes in two survivors of a horrific car crash (Lisa Gaye and Don Hannah), keeps them drugged and practically comatose, lies to the inquiring police detectives with matching white turtlenecks (Fred Williamson and Jill Schoelen), and the whole situation triggers traumatic memories for Barbara, even some incestual ones. Why Barbara keeps them prisoner is not explained, though she may be just lonely and looking for company.

"State of Mind" has a story that I typically find intriguing (isolation and cabin fever hysteria) but it never develops its ideas into feature-length interest. Manouk carries a singular expression of sterile blankness; Lisa Gaye seems stoned throughout until the climactic twist; Don Hannah also seems stoned beyond recognition; the late Paul Naschy (the Spanish equivalent of Lon Chaney) appears in the opening sequence only to be killed off; and Jill Schoelen looks like a pallid robot with none of the charisma of her earlier roles. Fred Williamson seems to be in his element as he smokes his trademark cigar (he apparently never wears makeup when he is in front of the camera, according to the filmmakers) but he is needed on planet earth when the film dovetails back into that stoned house of horrors.

This Belgian-French-Dutch production almost took eight years before it saw any sort of distribution, courtesy of Troma productions. I don't know why anyone bothered because "State of Mind" is a curious misfire that is haphazardly directed, acted and edited by a crew who seem to have no idea how to make a suspense film. Belgium stands in for a very European-looking Montana, poor Don Hannah (Daryl's brother) is mostly wiggling while standing or writhing in pain and screaming when digging through holes or sealed-up crates (not one line of dialogue seems to have been written for him), and Lisa Gaye seems ready to break out of the doldrums to give it a lift yet, when she does, it is too damn late. I get a certain chill from seeing Lisa Gaye trying to strangle Jill Schoelen (and to be fair, there are one or two scenes that chill the bone), but that is not enough to visit this mangled dreck of mindless waste from David Lynch wannabes.