Dementia

Never heard of it, knew nothing about, watched it on a friend's recommendation and was struck by how daring and experimental it was for the time it was made. I was expecting a real piece of 50's cheese, but the further I got into it the more I realized it could not be so easily dismissed. Some of the nighttime black and white photography of the Gamine being pursued through city streets is right up there with THE THIRD MAN, and many of the images (especially the hacking off of a dead man's hand) are shockingly indelible. I'd place it many rungs above Ed Wood and perhaps only a rung or two below Herk Harvey (director/co-star and primary creative force behind the great ultra low budget masterpiece CARNIVAL OF SOULS, recently reissued on a gorgeous Criterion Collection DVD). Included on the DVD presentation is the re-cut version DAUGHTER OF HORROR, with Ed McMahon (!) providing a hilariously pretentious voice-over that was meant to make the film more accessible to a mainstream audience. It's a real hoot, one to play at parties to give your cinephile guests a laugh.

I watched Daughter of Horror, not the original version called Dementia. Of course the newer version has a voice over by Ed McMahon of Star search/Johnny Carson fame. Dementia had no voice over.

Neither film had dialog. The only thing you heard was the music of George Antheil. You watched as the faces of the actors gave the story. A woman (Adrienne Barrett) possessed by madness; the daughter of a philandering mother and a drunken father who murdered her, even as she murdered her father.

It was Luis Buñuel and Orson Welles throughout. Even the character of the rich man (Bruno VeSota) was channeling Orson Welles.

It is a bohemian rhapsody wrapped in madness. A strange but compelling film.

Powerful visual style highlights this noir nightmare film, originally made in 1951. Is it Freudian, Surreal, or just plain fugged up? This is outsider film making, a one of kind rarity(the director's only film)that either discards standard film technique, or is totally ignorant of it. But the photography and music are both weird, wild, and quite well done. No dialog!!

The original director's version (Dementia)is much better than the one with some of the gore cut out, and an intrusive, idiotic Ed McMahon voiceover(Daughter of Darkness).They are both on the DVD, so don't make the mistake of watching the censored "Daughter" version first.

Don't miss the highly suggestive "chicken eating" scene. It's hilarious!!

This is one of those (exceptionally) rare very low budget films where you can see clearly that, if the director had had more time and more money, we would be discussing a classic "film".

Better known to buffs of the odd, the obscure, and the strange as "Daughter of Horror", in the tale as told we are witness to the unraveling of a mind. Like "Eraserhead", the best of this sub-genre, it is difficult to tell where the madness starts and where reality ends- or, indeed, if any of what we see on screen is real at all. It is hard to get any sense of what is occurring from the Gamine's point of view. Are the events happening to her? Is she dreaming? Hallucinating? The viewer (or, at least this viewer) is always a little off balance while watching this movie, and I think that that is what the director was aiming at.

I would go so far as to say that, within the budgetary constraints imposed, this movie is a masterpiece. As stated in the synopsis, this is a dark movie with no sympathetic characters, no attractive locales, no hope. Were it just a Film Noire murder story, it would still be a very good movie. As a descent into madness, it excels.

Thanks be to TMC for reviving this curiosity for a popular audience. I can't imagine what the movie's producers foresaw in the way of audience potential. I gather the film was shot in 1953, certainly not a promising period for an experimental feature of any kind. I also gather the atrocious narrative was added later to maybe give the package commercial appeal. But not even a 50's drive-in farthest from town would book a weirdo like this. Perhaps college area theatres would have booked it as a midnight feature, playing up the sex angle. Anyway, to me, its origins appear puzzling, indeed.

All in all, the end result is about as schizoid as the lead female character, combining striking visuals and special effects with amateurish acting and brain-dead narration. Someone in production certainly had an artistic eye for visual composition—check out the long shot of the gamin entering and exiting the spacious hotel lobby. They're beautifully composed. Actually, the visuals suggest that perhaps Welles saw the production before filming Touch of Evil (1957), especially Dementia's skid-row area that resembles Evil's Venice beach locations.

Certainly the movie has its cheesy elements. But to call the movie itself cheesy is to miss the artistic undercurrent that kept me hooked.