The Experiment In Terror begins in the San Francisco Twin Peaks neighborhood. Bank teller Kelly Sherwood (played by a then ripe 27-year-old Lee Remick) returns home late one evening. After pulling into her dark garage, she is ambushed by a man hiding in the shadows. He does not reveal his face, but his presence is marked by a heavy, wheezing asthmatic breath. The menacing lung-challenged stranger reveals he has been stalking Ms. Sherwood for some time (he knows her routine, her measurements (which he reveals to her while stroking Remick’s tasty fat-free frame), and her 16-year-old kid sister with a boy’s name, Toby (played by a not ripe 20-year-old Stefanie Powers, one of the few actresses who looked better in her thirties than in her twenties). The stranger delivers a brutal ultimatum: Kelly must steal $100,000 from the bank where she works and deliver it to him. If she contacts the police or the FBI, he will kill both her and Toby, and maybe even rape them, too (just because he’s that kind of guy).
Perhaps subconsciously wanting to be raped and murdered, or perhaps just to drive the plot of a “not a whodunit” but a “how will they catch him,” Kelly calls the FBI, specifically, Special Agent John "Rip" Ripley (played, not particularly well, by Glenn Ford, who gives the character an odd, arrogant indifference to almost everything and everyone around him). The rest of the movie is fairly standard “how will they catch him” fare until the bizarre Candlestick Park ending (and you’ve never seen a stadium empty so fast), broken up with three memorable sequences:
The first is a creepy scene in which a woman (played by beatnik Patricia Huston) who had contacted the FBI regarding a suspicious man, (who is, of course, the stranger) and then became instantly thirsty for Glenn Ford, is murdered (by the stranger) in her mannequin workshop, and left hanging among dozens of lifeless dummies.
The third is an interesting nod to Psycho, a prediction of Ross Martin’s future role in The Wild Weld West as a master of disguise, and a precursor to our current transsexualism. Kelly is in a restaurant lady’s room, doing lady stuff, and thinking she is safe with her FBI protection. An old woman enters the shitter. She seems feeble and harmless. Until Kelly hears the same wheezing, asthma-like breath that has been terrorizing her throughout the film. Yup, it’s the stranger in drag, proving to Kelly she can never be safe unless she goes through with his demands.
Ross Martin’s performance is the highlight of the film. His character is a mix of calculating cruelty and unpredictable degeneracy, along with a dash of humanizing paternal concern (shown in the film’s quaint 1960s subplot of interracialism). With his wheezing voice and unnerving delivery, Martin’s chilling, unsettling portrayal makes his character one of noir’s best villains.
Lee Remick is her usual cute, competent but not particularly interesting self. At least she is spared the failure she was to experience in her other 1962 Blake Edwards’ film, Days Of Wine And Roses, where she was wholly unconvincing as a cute, competent housewife who descends to the gutter of alcoholism and prostitution.
If it hadn’t had such a dud of an ending, Experiment In Terror would be in the Top Rank of Noir. As it is, it’s still more than decent entertainment 64 years after its initial release.
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