Steve-Calvert.co.uk
Steve-Calvert.co.uk
A Passion For Horror
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Dementia was made in 1955. It is a black and white film and is unusual in the fact that it has no dialogue at all. It works very well without any too, but that doesn't mean that it has those annoying storyboards, that you might have seen in really old films like the 1922 Nosferatu. Dementia manages quite well without those either thank you very much. The closest thing to that malarkey is when a sheet of windswept newspaper headlines about stabbings in the area. Dementia was re-released under the title Daughter of Horror and with the addition of a narration. To be honest, I find there is little benefit gained from the added narration. The narrator does a little speech at the beginning of the film and turns up now again too add his two penneth worth to things, but to my mind the film can stand on its own two legs without any such help. In its most basic Dementia is the story of a mad woman, who, at the beginning of the film, wakes from a sleep troubled by strange nightmares. On waking, the troubled young woman takes a switchblade from out of her chest of drawers - it's a real pig-sticker too - and wanders out into the night-time streets of skid-row. The woman runs into a pimp and then spends the evening with the rich and rather obnoxious guy that the pimp pimps his stuff for. He is a real pig of a guy and there is one scene, where he sits feeding his face with chicken, that is awe-inspiringly disgusting to watch (and I'm normally quite partial to chicken too). The evening does not end, perhaps, as the-piggy-one would have liked, but I don't think that too many people watching the film would have a lot of sympathy for him somehow. There are also some rather surreal flashback sequences where the young woman's mind is carried back to her childhood. Ma and pa were, it would seem, not exactly role-model parents. At times, as I watched the film, the woman seemed to look as
if she were confused about where she was and what was happening,
but then she appeared to change entirely, as if different sides of a
split personality were tuning in and out. If you should decide to watch
the film - it runs for less than an hour and is certainly worth watching -
you might find that by the end of it you are wondering just how much of
the woman's adventure was real and how much was in her head. Perhaps even
if she left the hotel room at all. I certainly wondered all of these
things and still do now, which is perhaps exactly what the character had
to wonder every day of her life.
Adrienne Barrett ... The Gamine
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