KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Numerootno A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Leofwine_draca DAUGHTER OF HORROR seems to be a cult 1950s low budget thriller held in high regard by other viewers of it, but I'm afraid it's the kind of film that left me cold throughout. I'm not really a huge fan of cult or experimental film-making as so often the directors concentrate on technical qualities and forget to entertain their viewers in the meantime, and that's the case here.The film is about a young woman whose journey takes place over the course of one night. She's assaulted psychologically and physically by various characters including her own family members and various small-time hoods and pimps. Occasionally a disturbing flashback will reveal her state of mind and the reasons for it. There's no dialogue in the film other than the sonorous narrator who constantly tells you what to think and feel, and that's the part that annoyed me the most. The film might have been better off without him. The photography is pretty good and creates a nightmarish atmosphere at times but overall I have to count this as a failure, albeit an interesting one.

lemon_magic "Dementia" is a hopelessly flawed and cheesy movie that hasn't aged well at all, but it is also an interesting and ambitious experiment in film noir and impressionism and fantasy...and I liked it.Oddly, the film it reminded me most of was "Hands Of A Stranger" - partially because it seemed to be the anti-matter opposite of that screen play (in which people NEVER STOP TALKING FOR AN INSTANT), but also because the art direction and set design constantly get in the way of what little plot there is and draw way too much attention to themselves.I saw the "silent" version of this film without the narration, and I will admit that the dialog and narration aren't needed - so heavy handed and symbol-laden are the visuals (and the soundtrack) that words aren't needed to know what's going on. And Marni Nixon's delicate wordless warbling in the background adds enough emotion to the proceedings to keep you from getting itchy for a human voice to add some concrete grounding to the proceedings.I don't know if it's fair to judge the "Acting" in the movie - all the characters are basic caricatures of certain states of mind and certain stereotypes (pimp, fat guy, cop, father, evil guy, "jazz musician (??)" and no one really has to "act" - all the actors just project at the camera. "Gamin" manages to hold center stage though all this, and she does fine for what the role requires.I wouldn't say you owe it to yourself to see this or anything - but if you enjoy the fringes of cinema and oddities of pop culture, you might get a bang out of "Dementia".

chaos-rampant 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.

marysz A wonderfully odd surrealist film made in 1953 that is reminiscent of the German expressionist films of the 1920s. A primly dressed young woman asleep in a dingy urban hotel room wakes up, puts a knife in her pocket and wanders the streets of a dystopian city filled with lecherous and violent men. A newspaper headline shouts of a stabbing. Is she responsible? In a flashback in a graveyard, we learn her father was a drunk who beat her. Her mother's sin was reading magazines, eating chocolates and seeing other men, which leads to her being murdered by her husband. In a way, the "horror" of the film is the ways women try to accommodate themselves to living in a male world. Women are prostitutes, downtrodden cleaning women, beaten wives or seductresses in this sick and unfair world. Perhaps the heroine's sin is simply the fact that she has the temerity that act out her anger at her fate instead of passively enduring it like the other women in the film. What's interesting to me is the fact that even though she's constantly characterized as being "evil" by the boorish male-voice over, she actually comes across as quite respectable and intelligent (maybe that's what ultimately makes her so threatening to the men). Daughter of Horror has low-budget, but creatively noir cinematography and a wonderful scene at a jazz club at the end. Daughter of Horror is truly avant-garde in the way it looks ahead to both the underground films of the sixties as well as the feminist movement.