Touches You

Simply Perfect

Excellent but underrated film

As Good As It Gets

This one isn't a bad film but I really was expecting to like it a lot more than I actually do - it's okay.The film tries to show a guilty conscious after doing some bad things - murdering! I do believe that a guilty conscious would produce nightmares and maybe even some hallucinations, those that do not feel guilt for their crimes could never experience this.It's kinda a throwback to the era of Silent Films... but with a narrator and a few sounds like laughter, crying - that sorta thing. The film does have the 1950's beatnik vibes to it, which I like. But overall I found the film rather droll and sometimes drab.4/10

If Ed Wood had done Meshes of the Afternoon, I like this description. Or a more cheapo noir equivalent of Carnival of Souls. After the KINO rerelease a few years back, this one features prominently in the shortlist of exploitation films that fumbled in their dark with notions of 'art' and tried to grasp higher. The resulting vision is usually awkward but so passionate it endears. On the lowest level of this spectrum there is Ed Wood, Yucca Flats; on the higher end, Dementia.If we accept what we see in Dementia about a troubled woman's nightmare night in skid row as a simply zanier guise of reality, it's definitely a clunker. But we have to be clunkers to take it at face value, in spite of all the clues laid out.Portents abound, haunting or premonition. A midget offers her a newspaper, the headline reading 'mysterious stabbing'. She finds herself in a graveyard and a hooded figure in a suit carrying a lantern takes her to the graves of her parents; vignettes of household drama are enacted in the foggy graveyard, as the girl watches in reminiscence. The father a no-good drunk, the mother a whore. He kills the mother in a jealous fit, and the daughter stabs the father.The stabbing repeats itself later, against a second abusive surrogate father who disgusts her. She allows herself to be so easily accosted by him, like her mother probably would. A cop is on her trail, looking exactly like her father. She escapes into a jazz club, escaping/sublimating the trauma into art and expression (a recurring theme in Lynch). Guilt sweeps back inside though, fingers pointing, hands swallowing her up like it's Night of the Living Dead. Eventually she wakes up again, or does she?Imagine this stabbed through with the most stridently symbolic language, such as Maya Deren favored. It is all about the guilt-ridden conscience; a wave in an anonymous beach threatening to engulf her, the hands fumbling for her neck. The precious medallion clutched in the disembodied arm. The men, all duplicitous and all after her.It's a neat little film, full of psychotronic charm and curious atmosphere halfway between noir and b-horror. It might have been tremendous 20 years before, but it was 1955 when it came out. More far-reaching things were afoot.

***SPOILERS*** Interesting movie about madness and murder that took some two years to be released here in the USA because of the graphic, which was trimmed down, violence in it.Gamine, Adrienne Barrett, has been suffering guilt feeling since both her parents Mom & Pop, Lucille Rowland & Ben Roseman, died tragically when she was a little girl. Mom was murdered by pop when she refused to have sex with him and in return Pop ended up getting stabbed to death with a stiletto in the back by Gamine in revenge. Now grown all up and psychotic Gamine has a habit of getting herself picked up by strangers in the street who end up getting murdered by her.One of those pick-up involved an over-sized Orson Wells look-alike called the Rich Man played by Bruno VeSota who takes her out to a number of jazzy night spots to while the night away. It's at the Rich Man's hotel suite that after stuffing his face with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken that he tries to make a inappropriate move on Gamine who ends up stabbing him in his gut with her stiletto. Falling down what looks like a 10 story building the Rich Man had grabbed, before her fell,Gamine's pendant that in fact can lead to her arrest! It's then that the film gets a bit surreal with Gamine going down to the street where the Rich Man's body is lying and in front of some dozen witnesses cuts his hand off that's griping, in a death grip, her pendant!You know something isn't quite right when the cop in charge of the Rich Man's murder investigation turns out to be Gamine's pop whom she killed about a dozen years ago! We all get to see what Gamine did when this guy with a black sock covering his head called the "Evil One", Richard Bannron, comes out of the local cemetery an shows Gamine as well as us in the audience in a flashback of what both she and Pop, in her killing him and him killing his wife, did!***SPOILERS**** On the run from the police lead by the resurrected from the dead Pop Gamine ends up in this really cool jazz club filled with a bunch of groovy people and featuring the famous band of Stony Rogers and his Giants. It's also at the club that Gamine runs into the Pimp who set her up with the Rich Man whom she later murdered and is now wanted by the police for it! The movie ends in a haze with Gamine back in her shoddy and cheap hotel room feeling that all that happened to her in the movie was just a bad dream. ****SPOILER ALERT*** It's then where Gamine is brought back to reality in finding the Rich Man's severed hand griping her pendant in the top drawl of her clothes cabinet!

Utterly bizarre film, whose reputation is known in the annals of 'weird cinema', veritably a silent film, with rib-tickling narration from none other than Ed McMahon(!)has a mute woman(Adrienne Barrett) we follow during a dark journey in a city, as she encounters possible danger and dementia in equal doses. We learn that she is haunted by a traumatic childhood thanks to her rotten, abusive father's murder of her mother. This woman stabbed her father in the back and this perhaps was the beginning of what she would soon evolve into..a knife murderer. Bruno VeSota(an Orson Welles lookalike)is a portly man of wealth who "acquires her services", expecting, obviously, rewards for taking her out on the town, instead becoming another stab victim. Richard Barron is a grinning sleazoid who leads her into the dark abyss. Ben Roseman both portrays her father and a cop who protects her from a drunkard.There is a protracted sequence in a club where she retreats from police after stabbing a victim, cutting his hand off to retrieve a necklace he pulled from her before falling stories to the street below. VeSota was awaiting his prize for treating Barrett to a night on the town, her not particularly willing to go the extra mile to satisfy his desires. What I think works for DEMENTIA/DAUGHTER OF HORROR is the way director John Parker presents it as off, an odd atmosphere where nothing seems quite right. It's as McMahon's narration points out to us, we are taking a trip into what seems to be this woman's nightmares, her madness. I watched the DAUGHTER OF HORROR version, but I enjoyed McMahon's narration myself because I think it gives the film a oddball charm. I thought it was beautifully shot in the noir tradition, with some very interesting faces photographed in weird angles. Considered controversial in it's time, this film is quite tame today, but I could see why it might've ruffled some feathers.