perica-43151 This German take on the Stanford prison experiment has additional layers of authenticity. Well made and interesting, masterfully acted and is much preferred to the Hollywood version.

grantss 20 male participants take part in a social experiment. For two weeks they will be housed in a prison, with a portion of them being guards and the remainder prisoners. Initially things go well, but after a while matters relations start to deteriorate.Superb movie. Great insight into the human psyche, herd instinct, how power corrupts and the depths to which we can sink. So good, it got remade by Hollywood, though to far less effect.

santiagocosme I heard of the real events of the experiment many years ago, and I always felt curious about what had really happened. Only recently did I decide to watch the movie. Although it is clearly not shot by the best technicians and directors around, and it has a TV movie feel, there's no denying that the story is so crazy that you cannot help but to be gripped when you discover the events that took place in Germany over a decade ago. As a social experiment, it has an extraordinary value. You are made to learn the extent of how humans operate depending on the circumstances that surround them and especially the amount of power that they have been handed. The scary thing is that you cannot help but realize that it could have been you. You could have been as cruel as any of the guys that humiliated the "fake" prisoners. This sort of experiments help better understand group behaviors and how to handle societies at large. Truly a must-watch movie. Not so much for its cinema value, but for the content of it.

lord woodburry I was impressed with this German made film which I found to be superior to its American copy starring Sean Penn later produced.This film is based loosely on a US sponsored experiment in which a prominent psychiatrist ran amok creating a prison in the basement of a noted liberal University. However differing from the real life experiment in which the participants, recruited from students between semesters received rather small emoluments, the movie version claims that the test subjects, recruited from newspaper ads were offered stupendous incentives for their collaboration.The film correctly states that volunteers were assigned roles and that as the experiment went on the participants fell into the roles that were given them. Indeed at one point the 'guards' kidnap one of the staff and throw her behind bars.In this version, a MI undercover agent has been inserted in the scenario in the role of a prisoner to act as a controller. He knows an escape route and can break up the experiment if he has to.There is a feel-good ending in which the mad scientist behind the experiment comes down on charges.In real life that never happened. Jocularly speaking of it a quarter century later, the real life psychiatrist hosted a US sponsored college course on psychology.