On October 6, 1971, American infantryman Jacob Singer is with the 1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed in a village in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, when his close-knit unit comes under sudden attack. As many of Jacob’s comrades are killed or wounded, others exhibit abnormal behavior with some suffering catatonia, convulsions, and seizures. Jacob flees into the jungle, only to be stabbed with a bayonet by an unseen assailant.
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Jacob awakens in the New York City Subway, where, after glimpsing what he believes to be a tentacle protruding from a sleeping homeless person, an inexplicably locked subway station exit results in him almost being hit by a train. The year is 1975; he is a postal worker and lives in a rundown apartment in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jezebel.
Jacob misses his old family and experiences visions of them, especially the youngest of his sons, Gabe, who had died in an accident before the war. Jacob is increasingly beset by disturbing experiences and apparitions, including glimpses of faceless vibrating figures, and narrowly escapes being run over by a pursuing car. He attempts to contact his regular doctor at the local VA hospital, but after being told that there is no record of him ever being a patient there, Jacob is told that his doctor has died in a car explosion.
At a party thrown by friends, a psychic reads Jacob’s palm and tells him that he is already dead, which Jacob dismisses as a joke. After declining to dance with her, he appears to witness an enormous creature penetrating Jezebel before he collapses. At home, Jacob experiences a dangerous fever, which Jezebel attempts to bring down with a painful ice bath.
One of Jacob’s former platoon mates, Paul, contacts him to reveal he is suffering from similar experiences, but is soon afterwards killed when his car explodes. Commiserating after the funeral, other surviving members of the platoon confess that they have all been experiencing horrifying hallucinations. Believing that they are suffering the effects of a military experiment performed on them without their knowledge or consent, they hire a lawyer to investigate.
Jacob’s comrades soon back down while Jacob suspects they have been threatened into doing so. He is abducted by suited men who try to intimidate him. Jacob fights them and escapes but is injured and nearly paralyzed in the process. He is taken to a nightmarish hospital, where he is told he has been killed and this is his home, but his chiropractor friend Louis comes to his rescue and heals him.
Jacob is approached by a distressed man who had been following him from a distance and who also dragged him away from Paul’s burning car. Introducing himself as Michael Newman, he tells a story of having been a chemist with the Army’s chemical warfare division where he designed a drug he called the Ladder, which massively increased aggression. Michael claims that, to test the drug’s effectiveness, a dose was secretly given to Jacob’s unit before the battle, causing some of them to turn on each other in a homicidal frenzy.
Michael’s story triggers a vision of Jacob wounded in Vietnam, which shows his attacker as a fellow American soldier. Jacob returns to his family’s home, where he finds Gabe, who takes him by the hand and leads him up the staircase into a bright light. The scene turns to a triage tent in 1971 as military medics declare Jacob dead, commenting that he had put up a tremendous fight to stay alive but now looks peaceful in death.
Experience the mind-bending journey of “Jacob’s Ladder” and uncover the truth behind Jacob’s haunting experiences. Watch “Jacob’s Ladder” on fmovies today and unravel the mystery of Jacob’s reality-shattering ordeal.