Professor Montserrat invents a machine that allows user to control the mind of other. When he and his wife Estelle test the technique on Mike Rosco, little does he know his wife will soon get addicted to the machine...
As the Monserrats play audience to their victims' living scenarios, which the couple write to their own perverse specifications, this psychedelic horror film deals with the apparatus of cinema, and it still puts the mind in a spin.
The Sorcerers interrogates the swinging sixties morality of 'pleasure with no consequences', prefiguring the way the hippy dream turned sour at the end of the decade.
It is the overall effect that impresses rather than any individual scene or composition, but the "psychedelic experience" is particularly well done, with the victim's face literally disintegrating in blobs of colour.
Karloff's mind-control process is analogous to cinema itself: an experience that allows people to embrace second-hand sensation, 'to do things' vicariously -- the more brutal and shocking the better, as in the case of some horror movies.
Boris Karloff brings his familiar adroit horror touch to the role of an aging somewhat nutty ex-stage mesmerist who aims to complete his experiments by dominating the brain of a young subject.
