Hey, everyone - Bob here, for the annual test of my friendship with Al. 

This year, he's given me an odd little film: Daughter of Horror.

Daughter of Horror, by my understanding, is a re-release of the 1955 film Dementia, which was originally going to be released in 1953 but was banned by the New York State Film Board. 

Al will probably kill me if I don't also mention that this film was also featured in the 1958 film The Blob (Crisis averted then).

It was also purchased, re-edited, and re-released with added narration. 

Notably, the narration - per Wikipedia, anyway - was done by Ed McMahon. Yes, that Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson's buddy on The Tonight Show. The re-release date is unclear - the actual film's page claims it was re-released in 1957, but Ed McMahon's page claims 1970.

No offense to Ed McMahon, who does a stellar job with the actual voiceover work for the narration, but the addition of narration was, in general, a really bad idea that takes a weird but intriguing film and basically spells out what's happening to make sure you don't miss details that were perfectly well presented to begin with. 

Now, if they'd wanted to add narration to Hard to Be a God, that I would've liked!

Literal first thing you see. This...felt like a bad sign.

However, this is kind of a dreamlike, experimental film, so despite the above, there's some parts you can still interpret multiple ways.

The film is also mostly a silent film, with no dialogue whatsoever except for the narration added to this version, and only a few bits of other vocalizations - wordless laughter and crying. Other than that, you're just in the company of the soundtrack for the rest of the film. This, obviously, contributes to the dreamlike atmosphere and opens events to interpretation, as for the most part you have to judge what's happening purely based on visuals. 

To be clear, I don't mean "silent film" as in "there is dialogue but it appears as text on screen." I mean that there's no dialogue whatsoever in any form.

In any case, in brief, here's the concept: The movie follows one night in the life of a woman who appears to be insane, suffering from hallucinations and unsettling behaviors. It is less a straight plot than a look at madness, and it is unclear how much or how little of the film actually happens. 

Some scenes are blatantly dreams or hallucinations (especially when the narrator just outright says so like we can't figure it out), while others may have happened, or may be her imaginings.

I'll briefly summarize what appears to occur. Obviously, spoiler warning...such as it is. Seriously, though - if anything that I said above sounded interesting, and you're willing to deal with a short-but-slow film with some too-blatant narration to see what it's about, you may wish to watch the film before reading anything below as it probably plays better going in with less knowledge.

Otherwise, carry on.

Oh no, I'm totally in the same shot as this wave! Please ignore how you can see it through my head!

The woman has a dream about drowning, then wakes, takes a switchblade, and goes out on the town. She encounters various people, is attacked by a drunk and rescued by a cop who beats the drunk to death, and is accosted by a man who gets her to come with him to a rich man he appears to work for. 

She goes out for a night on the town with the rich man, flashes back to when she killed her drunk and abusive father for killing her mother (an adulteress), then is largely ignored by the rich man at home until he comes over to try to kiss her (apparently treating her like a prostitute), at which point she stabs him. He grabs her necklace and plummets out the window, and she flees, seen by multiple people, and tries to get it back from his corpse, but it's holding on too tightly so she uses her switchblade to cut his hand off and takes both, then hides them in a flower seller's basket. 

Then, she flees from the pursuing police into a nightclub (which we are blatantly told is a hallucination), until she is caught and hallucinates everyone knowing what she did, including her victim laughing at her. Then she wakes up in bed...but sees the hand and pendant in her dresser.

You'll notice that that's not really a ton of plot. Indeed, this is a fairly short film, just shy of an hour long. I'd argue it could've been even shorter, as there's a lot of scenes or shots that just drag on for a very long time - some for stylistic reasons, but still. I think you could cut this down by a good twenty minutes and not lose much of anything. 

It just takes far too long to get to things sometimes, especially when it is obvious what's going to happen - for instance, it's about twenty minutes of the runtime between her meeting the rich man and her killing the rich man, and it's pretty obvious from the first second of their time together that that's where this is going. They just drag it out over several scenes of them in the car, attending a restaurant, attending a club, and spending time at his (very fancy) apartment. It just keeps going. 

We even watch the rich guy eating chicken wings for two thirds of eternity.

I'm just as bored by this as you are, lady.

That said...it's still quite an interesting film. The acting is all terrifically strange in just the right way for this. The lead, Adrienne Barrett, does a particularly tremendous job of acting just a bit off - her reactions to people feel just slightly unsettling, she smiles at weird times and in strange manner, she holds her gaze on things for just a few seconds too long, that sort of thing. 

Her late-film freakouts are also terrific. She's really very good in the role and holds the viewer's attention well, which is a good thing since she's in the vast majority of shots in the film and has to communicate a great deal through just expression and movement. 

She's a major contributor in the film setting its mood and atmosphere extremely well.

The cinematography is also worthy of praise - there's a lot of great shots in this film that set a dark and twisted atmosphere and make things feel just a bit wrong, a bit confused and unreal. It makes excellent use of light and shadow, and of set design, to communicate that the world is not quite being seen truthfully and to add a touch of intimidation and danger to just about every moment. 

No shot feels like it's taking place in true safety - it either feels actively frightening, at least unsettling, or just confused and wrong, but all clearly intentionally so.

The film also makes use of a lot of visual symbolism - for instance, the police detective who keeps showing up throughout the film in various places, sometimes in direct pursuit of the lead and sometimes just seemingly in the same place, is the same actor who plays the lead's alcoholic and abusive father that she killed in her past - a literal representation of her past haunting her constantly. (It would be perhaps more impactful if that fact wasn't lampshaded so blatantly by the narration midway through, which outright states: "...behind you, the policeman with the face of your father, the face of your first victim, pursuing you relentlessly in your haunted brain...")

Seriously, the narration really screws with this film. Sorry, Ed. It isn't as bad as Scared to Death, but it just feels like it was added because people didn't feel like the original film was interpretable, in which case...maybe just don't re-release it? 

The whole point of this film is to be weird and make you second-guess what you are seeing and figure out what it means - adding something that just tells you what it means kind of invalidates the movie as a whole.

I also really loved how they presented the flashback to the death of her parents - it's a little on the nose, but a really fun and artistic presentation. Rather than flashing back to her childhood home, the film flashes to a graveyard, where a tall man in a suit with a mask on shows her visions of her parents and their deaths...which are done very stage style by just adding home props and furniture to the graveyard itself. 

Slender Man version 0.12a?

The mother even falls dead right in front of the tombstone reading "Mother," which is admittedly kind of direct but does get the point across. Credit to them for the overall sequence, which was a visually interesting and unusual way of presenting the concept.

Really, that's the way of things with this film - it has a lot of visually interesting, creative presentation, marred by a longer-than-necessary runtime (even for its short length), overly blatant narration, and a few outright silly bits that could perhaps be excused as representations of the lead's madness, but really are probably artifacts of the time or just some poor filmmaking creeping in. Most notable for that is the bit involving her trying to get her pendant back from the rich man's corpse: When we first see it held in his hand, it's held very loosely, but when she goes to take it, it is gripping the pendant tight, so she has to cut the hand off. With a switchblade. Which seems difficult, and likely to leave even more evidence on the area and your person than just leaving the pendant. 

By the way, maybe don't cut off the whole hand but just a finger or two to get the pendant? Not that I've thought about this sort of thing.

Then, she has an entire chase sequence through town, keeping the hand on her person the whole time, and somehow has no blood whatsoever on her. 

Again, you could argue that it's a hallucination thing, but...really, I think it might be more an artifact of this being a 1950s film and not wanting / being allowed to show much gore. There is a bit of blood on the mother's hand in her death scene, but not much beyond that. 

It doesn't matter much to the plot anyway since some or all of that may not even be happening, but still.

Cool artistic "followed by spotlight" shots, though.

Otherwise, the only remaining major criticism I have to present is the soundtrack, which is just aggressively dreamlike and ethereal in a way that starts out interesting and quickly becomes annoying, largely because the same sequence of notes repeats over and over and over and over in the film with very little variation for most of its runtime. It sounds like the theme they'd use for strange and fascinating parts of alien planets in the original Star Trek - high, airy female singer singing wordlessly, ascending and descending note runs, that sort of thing. 

It's good! 

Until you hear it for nearly an hour straight, broken only by a big band number late film. It's the voice version of the soundtracks to Rollergator or Mesa of the Lost Women.

Bruno VeSota, whose performance here strangely reminded me of Orson Welles' in The Trial.

Honestly, there's more I could say, but I kind of want to leave it there. This is not a bad film, though I suspect the original version might have been superior - I'm not sure what other than the narration (which was a bad choice) was adjusted in this one, so it's possible this improved it in some ways and hurt it in others, or that is was just hurt and not improved at all. 

Still, it's an interesting concept, just presented in a way that's lengthier than it needs to be and with some awkwardness and confusion that can't always be excused as just the film portraying madness. It's a strong attempt at its concept and even in its current state, leaves some things just open to interpretation enough to be an intriguing watch - just be ready for a slow pace and some poor presentation choices along the way.

I think overall I'm glad I watched it. This doesn't nail its concept, and there's definitely room for notable improvement...but it's a successfully weird and compelling film all the same.

Happy Birthday, Al.

Fun note: Angelo Rossitto, pictured here, would go on to play Master of "Master Blaster" fame in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Hey, everyone - it's Bob, back for another of Al's requested birthday reviews. This one was rather less painful than some of the others, though make no mistake, I'm still left pretty mystified by this one - just more pleasantly mystified than the usual.

This time, Al's got me looking at The Trial, Orson Welles' 1962 film based on Franz Kafka's Der Process, starring Anthony Perkins, with Welles himself in a major role.

The Trial is the tale of Josef K, a man who stands accused of...something. No one will quite tell him what it is, often just responding with questions or advice about what to do while Josef just wants to know what it is he's even being accused of and marvels at the strange, arcane, and often seemingly corrupt processes of the courts and law. Mystified and offended by the situation in which he finds himself, Josef desperately tries to find a way to free himself from the shadow now hanging over his life as his mental state becomes increasingly erratic and distressed. It is framed by a sort of fairy tale, which opens the film in full and is later recounted in part to Josef near the end, about a man seeking admittance to The Law who is stopped by a guard and lives out his life unsuccessfully trying to gain entry, only for the guard to finally tell him that only the man could ever have entered the door but the guard is now closing it. So, you know, one of those cheery and easily understood fairy tales.

The plot of the film proper is deeply confusing, necessarily so, as Josef's confusion - and therefore the viewer's - is central to the entire experience of the film. The film is quite aggressive about never providing any true, concrete answers to what is going on, and simply bizarre events will happen on a fairly regular basis, whether that's Josef being arrested but allowed to just go about his daily life just fine, or Josef suddenly finding officers that he'd accused of soliciting bribes being flogged in a closet at his workplace, or Josef discovering that a painter's dilapidated shack is actually attached to the court records room, then fleeing from a horde of young girls through an inexplicable tunnel system. Time frequently skips forward a considerable distance with no real announcement of that fact, as well.

Ordinarily, I'd regard these as significant failings of filmmaking, but somehow with The Trial, they are just part of the experience. Similarly, there are other clearly intentional bits of awkwardness, such as people frequently talking over each other, and moments where characters inspect something clearly important to the plot but we aren't shown a bit of it...and again, these are clearly a part of the style of the film, not errors, and I can't really complain about them as they succeed in what they're designed to do, which is create one heck of an unsettling atmosphere.

The Trial is unnerving and disorienting at all times, succeeding in setting its mood by never once letting a scene get comfortable. The moment that you start to feel you understand a scene and are able to fully follow it, the movie immediately throws in a strange event or odd twist. Oh, you're settling in to a bit where Josef is chatting about his case with a nurse working for his lawyer? Well, by the way, there's another client just living in the maid's room. Getting used to the inspector's mannerisms while he's questioning Josef? Well, here's three of Josef's work associates hanging out in his neighbor's bedroom for no adequately explained reason. Okay with Josef talking with his uncle about the possibility of using a computer to figure out his alleged crime, itself kind of a weird concept? Here's an officer being flogged and apologizing to Josef for the noise, then putting tape over his own mouth to quiet down. The words "well, that just happened" will come to your mind a lot in this film.

And it's excellent.

I can't say I truly understood what was going on, but my goodness, this was good. From the setting to the mood to the sound to the acting, it's all great. I have to give particular praise to Anthony Perkins, playing Josef, who just does an absolutely incredible job showing a mix of determination, confusion, righteous indignation, and a gradual descent into confused panic and distress, including multiple scenes where he just entirely breaks down in a panic attack so convincingly I would've been deeply worried for him if I'd been on set. He's terrific, and that's a darn good thing since he's in almost every single shot of the movie - which helps to keep us confused, of course, but also binds us to him in a way that makes us deeply sympathetic of Josef, who is just as confused and disoriented as we are. It's a lot of ask of a single actor, and Perkins is more than equal to the challenge.

As for the others - everyone fulfills their role to the fullest. Welles is great and excellently erratic as Josef's strange and domineering lawyer, who seems to do little for his clients but verbally abuse them but insists that it is better than the alternative. The variety of more minor characters that Josef meets are always played well, with a slightly off-kilter style that leaves the viewer constantly in at least slight discomfort even in the most calm scenes. It always feels like someone is leaving something unsaid, something so deeply important that if you just heard it, it would reveal everything to you and to Josef, but no one will. No surprise, then, that Josef gets increasingly distressed through the film.

What does it all mean? Honestly, I think it'd take more than one viewing for me to adequately theorize about it in any detail (surprisingly, this is one I'd actually be willing to watch again to try to figure it out, though). Perhaps a metaphor for life in general, I think? A study on the strange and often arcane intricacies of human life, and the nature of guilt and innocence? Or perhaps more direct, a critique of just how the law functions, how lost ordinary people can be in a system that protects the powerful - there is, to be certain, a lot in this film about the high magistrates being out of Josef's reach and out of the reach of those who work with him, with the authorities he does meet being referred to as smaller, and Josef, especially towards the end, questions the entire concept of judgment of humans by humans. That is probably the clearest element of the film, an almost sarcastic prodding of the legal system and its treatment of the ordinary people who get caught up in its machinations and corruptions.

Perhaps, as well, it is about how humans can get so wrapped up in their own self-assurance that they avoid that which could help them - frequently, Josef refuses to follow advice he is given - whether to immediately present a paper, or to confess and seek help, or to take an "ostensible acquittal" which will, at least, restart the cycle from the beginning again and again, or to plead lunacy, or more, even casting aside a priest's outreach. He also brushes aside the concerns of family, and seems to value his ambitions at the office - or at least, a fear of being fired - over caring for his cousin in town or visiting with his uncle. He sometimes seems to be right in his actions, sometimes wrong, but Josef always seems to be driven by his thought on what should be happening, his path forward, rarely - though not never - willing to truly take advice from another.

I won't go into the ending - not that I'm sure it would qualify as spoilers when I'm not sure I can describe what happens in a way that ascribes it meaning that will make perfect sense - other than to say that it seems to reflect a theme of Josef's rejection of judgment and refusal to simply obey and follow a system he does not agree with or understand - in this case, a positive, though one that perhaps makes little difference.

My apologies if the above makes little sense - honestly, The Trial is quite a difficult film to describe because it's a difficult film to comprehend. What I can say with clarity, however, is that it is good. It is excellently put together, excellently acted, and difficult because it is intended to be difficult, rather than through some flaw of the filmmaking. It's deeply perplexing and left me more than a little lost quite frequently, but at the same time, it's undoubtedly an achievement of filmmaking and probably the best film Al has had me watch for one of these. Brilliant and artistic, if utterly opaque, it's one I will definitely praise but perhaps find difficult to truly recommend, if that makes any sense.

If it doesn't, well, perhaps I've just put you in the right mindset for The Trial.

Happy Birthday, Al.

 Since both of my Parents' Birthdays this Week, let's do a special Film.  It's about someone's...

All looks great.

So why do they look so ominous when they are cooking all of this meat?

Their Son is full of ideas and high on imagination.

Is he imagining all of the weird things in his life though?
If even 1% of it is real, that's a big thing!

Can he make sense of his dreams?  Is he a reliable Narrator?

Will this at least be less depressing than the *last* 'Kid in '50s America thinks that X is an X' Film I watched?

Things continue to get weirder as the Son learns about what his Dad does for a living.

Is that what he's sautéing in the pan?

It all comes to a head one night in this Dark Comedy...which I won't SPOIL.

As the Title suggests, it's on Tubi.  See it if you need to know.

A weird, dark little Film.  The first thing to note is that the Film was made by Bob Balaban, who I don't think of as a Director.  I think of him as 'that deadpan guy from that Movie.'  You have one in your head, don't you?  So it is interesting to see him leaning into what is more of a weird, dark Film than a quirky one.  At times, it seems like it might go for silly.  Most of the time, however, underlying tension just keeps building and building.  The thing here is the balance.  Can the Film balance the weird, the mundane, the dark and the light?  Not quite.  Like another Film I talked about recently, I could see someone taking another crack at this concept.  Yes, I do know about Mom and Dad (with Nic Cage) and it's not quite the same.  That one is more like The Screwfly Solution (from Masters of Horror) than this Film.  Without SPOILing the Ending at all, they basically had to commit to an ending and I'm not sure that they picked the right one.  That's subjective, admittedly.  Parents isn't quite what you expect it to be, nor does it ultimately end up like you're maybe hoping it will be.  Speaking of hoping, I'd hoped to find more Films with the Actor playing the Son...but he only did this one.  This Credit sure is...unnecessary in hindsight then, no?

An odd little Film that tries to balance the idea of the mystery and the reality.  In the end, it doesn't *quite* stick the landing though.