Repressed erotic desire fuels eerie nightmares in visionary director Edgar G. Ulmer's stunning interpretation of Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Young Paul Cartwright (James Lydon) is seeking his father's killer while his mother Virginia (Sally Eillers) finds herself caught between her husband-to-be, the suave but sinister Brett Curtis (Warren William), and the memory of her noble, dead husband, Judge Albert Cartwright.

Strange Illusion was produced by PRC Studios in 1945 between the production of Ulmer's Faustian stalker movie, Bluebeard, and Club Havana. With musical score composed by long time Ulmer collaborator Leo Erdody (with a little help from the Schumann Concerto) and photographed by cinematic pioneer, Eugene Schufftan (uncredited), Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion is poverty row poetry of the first order. It is the only movie ever made that begins and ends in a dream sequence!

In one of the most hallucinatory openings of 1940s movies, a boy's dead father comes to him in a dream, warning him to beware of the man his mother intends to remarry. The boy, Paul Cartwright (James Lydon) wakes up from the dream, but finds it's coming true when he learns his mother (Sally Ethers) has been dating a slick charmer named Brett Curtis (Warren Williams). Paul suspects Brett's a murderer, but his mom and sister (Jayne Hazard) are too smitten to listen. It's HAMLET, American-style, as Paul gathers evidence with a can-do teen spirit the tortured Dane could never quite muster. Acclaimed "B" director Edgar G. Ulmer (DETOUR, BLUEBEARD) makes sure the proceedings are infused with enough gloomy predestination and bizarre touches to make this a favorite among fans of his unusual cinematic style. Charles Arnt plays a sinister psychiatrist who tries to get Paul to believe his visions are the result of "Oedipal jealousy." Regis Toomey plays another doctor, who has his doubts. With Jimmy Clark and Mary McLeod as Paul's teenage pals, this plays like Hitchock meets the Hardy Boys, and is worth seeking out.