Purely Joyful Movie!

Lack of good storyline.

Just perfect...

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

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.

What an odd little film. At just under an hour runtime- and with practically no dialogue- this mostly silent, noirish, horror-thriller is beautifully shot- and has more "gore" (a term used lightly here) than you'd expect to see in a film made in the 50's.In it, we follow a young woman out on the prowl for vengeance. A woman who was "born into horror"- for she was raised amidst a domestic abuse situation, during which she witnessed her alcoholic father murder her adulterous mother (hence the alternative title: Daughter Of Horror).She manages to enact revenge upon her father...and get away with it. And, thus, fancies herself a bit of a sociopath. But she also retains her extreme intolerance for misogyny.She sees the misogyny of her father reflected everywhere she goes...and it's pushing her toward the brink of insanity. She still fantasizes about murdering him. And she can't even leave the house at night without being accosted by every other guy on the street; acting like they own her.But this only pushes her toward her next act of vengeance. And this time she has a plan.She pretends to be a prostitute; and makes a deal with the local pimp (The Devil). He sets her up with one of his wealthy clients: her target; and he gets to keep the money.The man is a wealthy, glutton, and socialite, with a penchant for beautiful young women. And he just so happens to be the same john that his mother was seeing, when her father was driven to bitter, alcohol-induced insanity, and murder...She has chosen to hang with the devils and walk with the ghouls, but is she really cut out for this path to Hell? Or is this Hell but a construct of her imagination, stemming from her guilt? The double twist at the end, reveals why everything turns so bizarre in the latter portion of the film, at least.What makes this film so odd, is that it first comes off as if it is feminist, in nature. Like she's a superhero, of sorts: wandering the streets; luring in unsuspecting misogynists to their deaths. I mean, her actions are at least somewhat justified- in a Dexter sort of sense- you'd think. But the narration, and guilt trip she is sent on, kind of throw this into question- making the whole thing seem more like it was meant to be a propaganda piece, teaching the misogynistic patriarchy about the dangers of raising a young feminist-minded daughter. It's really hard to read what the "motive" of this film was for contemporary viewers, from a modern context. However, with that being said, it's certainly worth a watch for it's attractive mise-en-scene; bloodless gore; and that epic jazz sequence at the end.6 out of 10.

"Dementia"/a.k.a. "Daughter of Horror" is creepy fun. Nothing like you'd expect. It's surreal, like that part of "Glen or Glenda" where a room full of people mock poor Glen and then come at him with their fingers wiggling, only here it's scary instead of funny. The movie has no dialog, and if it did we'd probably die laughing. Marni ("King and I" "My Fair Lady") Nixon does the soprano obbligato throughout. There's an Orson Welles character in it, too. And a sofa with some laughing, half-dressed, blond broad out in a cemetery. Honest, I am not making this up.David Lynch has been borrowing from this one for years and none of us knew.

Dementia is a relatively short (originally running at 61 minutes, but cut to 56) noirish mood piece that begins and ends with the camera slowing zooming into the hotel room window of a damaged woman, the Gamin (meaning street urchin - played by director John Parker's secretary Adrienne Barrett). She is stirred to awakening from unsettled, possibly nightmarish dreams, and begins a late-night descent into the more lubricious elements of modern city life. Through the hidden dirt alleyways and the jazz dens of '50's America, her night intertwines with a drunk hobo, a lascivious pimp, and a rich man (played by producer Bruno VeSota) whom she travels round with as he consumes the fruits of his wealth. The Gamin's mental state, and implied madness are signified by flashback's of a traumatic event with her parents; she kills her father in retaliation of his murder of her mother.Shot largely with static, black and white shots by cinematographer, William C. Thompson (who worked extensively with legendary Edward D. Wood), each frame is imbued with a strange tension, and are incredible compositions of beauty and expressionist horror. An effective musical score by George Antheil is significant within the context of the film, which uses no dialogue, and minimal sound (we occasionally hear laughter, cries, and sound effects such as breaking glass). These elements, including some very expressionistic acting styles, has led to the film being often compared to Robert Weine's silent masterpiece, Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari (1920), and whilst Dementia is certainly a competent little shocker, and has some visual flares of insanity, it doesn't really hold up against the German predecessor. It is easy to compare the stilted visual style of the film to the film noir cycle that was prevalent in the '40's and '50's, which shows the underbelly of the city in all of its muddied repulsion. An antidote to the predominant film style of the time, which falsely portrays the Eisenhower-era complete with the technicolor façade With a cyclical narrative, the Gamin finds herself in the same hotel room, waking from a possible nightmare at the end of the film, leaving the mystery of her true identity and a questioning of her level of insanity: Are these visions and city excursions simply a trip through her almost-linear nightmare? Whilst the film has been largely forgotten, it is most famous for being the film shown in the cinema in The Blob (1958), it is still a very interesting "dream-narrative", and one which undoubtedly had influence on later film makers.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com