Watch Dementia For Free

Truly Dreadful Film

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Blistering performances.

'Dementia' is experimental horror film with elements of film noir and expressionist cinema. Also known as 'Daughter of Horror' but that version includes narration by Ed McMahon. I personally prefer the original one without it as the narration gives the film slightly Ed Wood vibe. Probably because the film balances on the thin edge of good taste/bad taste.Made in 1953 but released in 1955 after going through many cuts to please the censors. 'Dementia' is not classical horror/slasher/exploitation flick, but it is a wonderful nightmarish trip into the paranoid (and perhaps, guilt ridden) mind of a lonely woman (Adrienne Barrett). The film is not meant to be understood wholly (and I don't even try to explain the plot or its possible meanings here as I probably didn't get it myself) - does the heroine wakes up from nightmare or wakes into nightmare. The film definitely has some Freudian undertones with father/law enforcer character. 'Dementia' is rather a mood film than simple storytelling. If one is in the mood to to take a trip into surreal twisted noirish cityscape. The film might look cinematically bit sloppy (probably thanks to the inexperience of director John Parker to whom it seems the only film he directed), but nonetheless it is a demanding and powerful stuff. Unique cinematic experience.The role of a Rich Man was played by Bruno VeSota (he was also one of the producers) who later became regular actor in several Roger Corman productions.

The 1955 film is an abstract expressionist take on a dark and disturbing subject. Not for all tastes, but I find it entrancing. A masterpiece. The original sound track is brilliant, with music that was composed by George Antheil, an American avant-garde composer who lived from 1900 to 1959.Then some knuckleheads bought the rights to the film and decided it needed some histrionic narration thrown in here and there. The narration is a distracting annoyance and detracts seriously from the film. Many people on archive.org complained about this and despaired over what could be done. Several people claimed the narrator is Ed McMahon, the intro man for the old Johnny Carson show. I don't know how they came to this conclusion. One enterprising person created his own electronic musical soundtrack, but that eliminated all the original audio. So how can you watch it with the original soundtrack but without that imbecilic narration? I found a way.I ported the video file to an audio WAV file (using freeware tools) and opened it in Audacity, a wonderful tool for audio editing, also available as freeware. Whenever that annoying voice appeared, I selected that portion of the audio stream and set it to silent. Then I copied a nearby portion of sound from the original sound track equivalent in time and pasted it over the silent portion. I used VirtualDub (more freeware) to apply the modified sound track to the video. The resulting sound track is narration free! We have the original Dementia back! Find it at archive.org.

If Ed Wood had gone to film school he might have made this quirky howler. The graveyard scenes & omniscient narrator are standard Wood tropes. This short film is a mash up of Freudian psycho babble w/classic noir cinematography, graphic violence, overwrought acting & some nifty camera angles. There's even a reverse tracking shot through a window that Hitchcock would use in Psycho 5 yrs later. I'm not saying he stole it from this movie, but.... Throw in a severed hand, a jazz combo, and Orson Welles' double. If it really is Ed McMahon narrating, it's a bonus. That's Marni Nixon doing a 'theremin' yodel on the soundtrack! (Was she cheaper than a real theremin?) The "actors" look like an Ed Wood casting call of 'street people'; everyone looks garish & homely. Granted, some of the on-location night scenes shot in seedy, downtown wherever are so dark you can't see the action, but kudos for the effort. Too bad the print is pretty worn; there was some real artistic intent behind this deadpan attempt at horror. Worth seeing at least once, it's unique, nutty & fun.

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.