DAUGHTER OF HORROR (DEMENTIA) (director/writer: John Parker; cinematographer: William C. Thompson; editor: Joseph P. Gluck; cast: Adrienne Barrett (The Gamin), Bruno Ve Sota (Rich Man), Richard Barron (Evil One), Ben Roseman (Gamin's Father/Law Enforcer), Jebbie Ve Sota (Flower girl), Lucille Howland (Mother); Runtime: 60; Kino International; 1955)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A very curious and strange b/w film, which is a hard to classify oddity, involving the nightmare of a lonely, sexually repressed, psychotic woman, called in the titles The Gamin (Adrienne Barrett). There is no dialogue or narrator in the first version I saw, but in the later version Ed McMahon does the narration.
The film plays as a surreal nightmare for The Gamin, who is in a skid-row Hollywood hotel, where she imagines that she is taking a walk in the ocean and disappears in a giant wave. What follows is a visionary tale of Freudian images and those from those B-movies after WW11.
When she goes to open the bureau drawer and finds a switchblade knife there, she takes it with her as she leaves her room to go out at night, walking down the stairs to witness a beat cop arresting the abusive husband of her downstair's neighbor. She then walks in an alley of winos. When one of the winos grabs her and refuses to let go, her detective father (Ben Roseman) gets out of his police car, and beats the wino up, while she stands by gleefully laughing.
A midget newspaper vender sells her a copy of the Hollywood Tribune, whose headline is 'Mysterious Stabbing.' She is then picked up by a villainous smoothy, with a slim moustache, dressed in a black shirt and tie. The Evil One (Barron) takes a flower from the flower girl for his lapel, and then sells The Gamin to someone who looks like Orson Welles, The Rich Man (Bruno Ve Sota), who takes her for a ride, with both sitting in the back seat.
He takes her to the Club Pronto, where he smokes a big cigar and they watch a sexy female dancer perform. Demonic memories come back to her of her father sitting in bed in his undershirt, drinking whiskey and slapping her, and of her mother dressed up while lounging on the sofa eating some sweets. In the background is a cemetery with gravestones for her father and mother. When the father discovers a cigar in the ashtray from another man, he shoots his wife. The Gamin then sticks her switchblade in his belly.
These are some very weird Freudian dream sequences. In another scene, she goes with The Rich Man to his apartment and listens to him play the piano, then he rebuffs her offer of a drink, instead sitting down to the elegant meal his butler brings him, eating the chicken with his hands. When he goes to kiss her after the meal, he repulses her and becomes her second stabbing victim. But he grasps her pendant while struggling, which she will get back when she cuts off his hand, as the narrator tells her not to be afraid of the ghouls around the dead man's body, they won't touch her. She will deposit the severed hand with the pendant into the basket of the flower girl.
In the shadowy street, she's being trailed by the cop who has the same face as her father. In order to escape, she goes into the apartment of the Evil One, which is a drug house, where jazz is played by Shorty Rogers and the Giants, an interracial couple is hotly dancing, and the Evil One is kissing two pretty women who are at his table. Her smiling father comes into the club and gets an envelope from the Evil One. The rich man reappears, with his head peering through the window bars of the cellar apartment, and the same beat cop from before, is standing over him and smiling. Inside the apartment everyone is pointing at her, including her father, who is also waving handcuffs in the air, which he indicates are meant for her.
She once again sees herself drowning and the camera returns to a shot of her hotel room, as this nightmare ends. But the narrator poses the question, is it a dream of madness on a dark night -- or was it real?
This is a bizarre film, a precursor to Welles' "Touch of Evil" and Polansky's "Repulsion." If not made to be understandable, it is at least a very demanding depiction of someone demonically possessed by guilt.
REVIEWED ON 10/21/2000 GRADE: B
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews