Review by Milan Paurich
The first thing you notice in THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT is the butt-ugly early-'70s coiffures and facial hair adorning nearly every cast member. That and the incessant smoking, both of which are a lazy director's shorthand for, "Psst: this is a period movie, folks." For awhile that's pretty much all I noticed. Oh, yeah. And trying to identify the familiar faces underneath all of that mangy hair.
Truth be told, the film's basic set-up--based on a controversial real-life 1971 study conducted by Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo--did little to grab me. Certainly not the ham-fisted way it was playing out courtesy of Tim Talbott's glib, facile script (based on Zimbardo's book, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil") and Kyle Patrick Alvarez's equally unsubtle direction. To put it in academic terms, STANFORD PRI was flunking out as both psychology and sociology.
