Best movies like The Lunatic at Large

A petty criminal fakes insanity to serve his sentence in a mental ward rather than prison. He soon finds himself as a leader to the other patients—and an enemy to the cruel, domineering nurse who runs the ward.

Rubber-legged comedian Leon Errol made his talkie starring bow in Paramount's Only Saps Work. Based on a play by Owen Davis Sr., the film casts Errol as James Wilson, a kleptomaniac who starts with picking pockets and ends up robbing a bank. Wilson's friend Lawrence Payne (Richard Arlen) inadvertently aids our hero during one of his heists, ending up in deep doo-doo with the law. Before Wilson is able to extricate Payne from his dilemma for the sake of heroine Barbara Tanner (Mary Brian), he pauses long enough to pose as a private eye -- and even gives bellboy Oscar (Stu Erwin) tips on how to spot a crook! If only all of Leon Errol's feature films had been as consistently hilarious as Only Saps Work.

A troubled hedge fund magnate, desperate to complete the sale of his trading empire, makes an error that forces him to turn to an unlikely person for help.

A college dropout gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm and is on the fast track to success—but the job might not be as legitimate as it sounds.

It was Leonora Eames' childhood dream come true. She had married Smith Ohlrig, a man worth millions. But her innocent dream became a nightmare once she realizes the truth about her husband - he is power mad and insane! Since he will not grant her a divorce, she leaves her life of luxury on Long Island and goes to work as a receptionist in an impoverished doctor's office in NYC's lower east side. After Smith deceives her into a temporary reconciliation, Leonora becomes pregnant. By the time she realizes she is expecting, she and one of the doctors, Larry Quinada (James Mason), have fallen in love. But she is again lured backed to her wealthy husband to give her child financial security. Her sadistic husband is hell-bent on keeping her and her child prisoner. What will happen to Leonora?

A rich young woman fights to save her life when she is held captive by an obsessed former friend in her own penthouse.

Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, Susanna Kaysen's prescribed "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once becomes a strange, unknown journey into Alice's Wonderland, where she struggles with the thin line between normal and crazy. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she has been committed, and she ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside or the difficult world of reality outside.

A sociology instructor finds her new teaching duties at a private college interrupted by the presence of a killer.

After she misses her train, a young woman is forced to hitch a ride back to town. After managing to get away from a lecherous trucker, she is given a ride by a good-looking but somewhat mysterious young man, who she comes to suspect may be a dangerous escapee from a mental asylum.

Ellen Gordon, a New York executive's mistress falls for the executive's young business associate when the young man is accidentally sent to use the apartment where the executive and his mistress get together every Wednesday. More complications arise when the executive's wife shows up with plans to redecorate the apartment.

A psychiatrist returns to the insane asylum where her mother once worked and is now a patient, hoping to quell a bloody wave of horror that’s been unleashed. As she descends down the rabbit hole and discovers hard truths about her own past, she comes to understand the hospital is hiding secrets of its own, and that perhaps she and her mother have more in common than she realized.

A psychiatrist is drawn into a complex mind game when he questions a disturbed patient about the disappearance of a colleague.

The corporate board has Elmer committed to an asylum because he thinks he's a rabbit. At the sanitarium, Bugs agrees to trade places with Elmer.

Teenager Lynn kills her father while he tries to rape her - the receiving officer at the mental hospital cannot convince her that her father is dead. After electric shock treatment she escapes in a nurses car. There is a farm where the manager is unable to feed his pigs on the usual swill, they have tasted blood - Human Blood! Lynn stumbles on the farm, she is looking for work she explains. "Papa they tell me, what do you see One little girl as deadly as can be." The circle begins, feed people to the pigs - then eat the pigs.

On Christmas Eve 1950, Wilfred Butler dies in a burning accident outside his mansion in East Willard, Massachusetts. The residence is bequeathed to his grandson, Jeffrey. Twenty years later, lawyer John Carter arrives in East Willard on Christmas Eve with his assistant and mistress Ingrid, having been charged by Jeffrey (now registered as a patient in a mental asylum) to sell the house. The house, the town, even Jeffrey himself — all hold dark secrets that will be brought to light.

In the not so distant future, a team of white collar criminals are enlisted by the Federal government to thwart a cyber-attack that threatens to bankrupt the United States of America.

When his employer goes to Florida, a butler masquerades as a millionaire and winds up marrying an heiress.

Backwoods bombshell Myrtle marries George, only to find out that George neither can nor wants to satisfy her desires. Lots of heavy breathing, roughing-up and weirdo moralism ensues.

The Faust legend retold (loosely) and applied to a mentally disturbed patient in a hospital run by a doctor of dubious sanity himself. The patient offers the innocent orderly vast riches if he'll help him escape.

A young woman is brought to an asylum to receive special treatment from a mysterious doctor. Dr. Spector does more than just run the hospital -- he offers his patients as sacrifices to Satan.

A deranged killer escapes from a mental institution, intent on locating the psychiatrist whose testimony sent him to the asylum, holds the patrons of a bar hostage.

Robert Patrick stars as a private investigator traumatized by his father's suicide who goes undercover in a mental institution to uncover the murderer of his psychiatrist.

A group of college students regret their decision to sneak into the cellar of a haunted asylum on Halloween. One by one they encounter Smiley, the last of a flawed bloodline.

A mysterious disease threatens airline passengers.

Comedy about a couple of interns in a hospital named 'The House of God'.

Carmelita Fuentes is a fiery-Latin singer/dancer in Mexico City who has designs on Dennis Lindsay, an American publicity agent, for unclear reasons, while Lindsay's shiftless uncle Matthew Lindsay aids and abets her every step of the way to the marriage altar.

At a mental institution, the resident physician, Dr Cohen, encourages his patients who believe they are important Nazi figures to act out their fantasies. The therapy sessions show Hitler consolidating his power by assembling his gang of supporters; however, they are interrupted at times, once because Davidson's uniform is at the dry cleaners, and another time because a patient who believes he is Picasso interrupts a session.

Minor league stock car racer Mitch Camponella gets closer to his NASCAR dreams when he's hired as private mechanic to a millionaire importer. But Mitch's ambition comes with a heavy price when he realizes that his new boss is a smuggler who's using Mitch as a pawn in a deadly illegal arms trade.

Behind the locked doors of a mental institution resides crooked politico Judge Drake, free from prosecution so long as he pretends to be crazy. To get the goods on Drake, private detective Ross Stewart has himself committed to the asylum as a patient. Meanwhile, reporter Kathy Lawrence, posing as Stewart's wife, acts as his liaison to the outside world.

Panic and fear overtake a small British farming community after a homicidal child-killer escapes from a local mental hospital.

A shocking exposé of the deplorable conditions and abuses from the Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities.

Documentary which tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years.

When the superintendent of the Canadian insane asylum, Dr. Maurice Bucke, meets poet Walt Whitman, his life and that of his wife and patients is radically changed. Like Dr. Bucke, Whitman has avant-garde ideas on the subject of mental illness. "Dreamers" is based on true events. Dr. Bucke became an important biographer of Walt Whitman.

A wounded archaeologist crawls into the camp of three kindhearted cowboys. When the cowboys bring him to a nearby trading post, he's murdered after he lets slip a secret about a hidden cave. Investigating his death, Ken and his friends encounter a land dispute between a pair of neighboring ranches, an arrogant German baron and a mysterious shack that houses a great secret.

After 12 years in an asylum, as she is reunited with friends and family, Dana begins to realize the events that led to her stay there may not have been imaginary.