Dementia 13 (1963)
By: Michael Helms on May 10, 2005.
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| MRA (Australia). Region 4, PAL. 4:3. English 2.0. 74 minutes |
| The Movie |
| Cover Art |
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| Credits |
Director: Francis
Ford Coppola
Starring:Patrick Magee,
William Campbell, Mary Mitchell, Luana Anders,
Bart Patton
Screenplay: Francis
Ford Coppola
Country: USA
AKA: The Haunted and
the Hunted |
Francis Ford Coppola squeezed out Dementia
13 from the Roger Corman production line
when the opportunity arose at the tail end of
the trans- European shoot for The Young
Racers to re-utilise the same cast and
crew and production facilities they'd been using
in Ireland. Coppola beat out future Cannon Films
honcho Menachem Golan (who had suggested making
a movie in Israel) by tailoring the Dementia
13 script to Corman's requirements which
was essentially to provide a Psycho knock-off.
A man and a woman on a jetty argue as they take
a row boat onto a lake. Rockabilly is blaring
from their transistor radio when the man has a
heart attack. The woman promptly disposes of him
(and the radio) overboard. The opening pre-credit
sequence finishes with a great shot of the man
hitting the bottom of the lake along with the
radio which is still playing! What follows is
the attempts of the woman, Louise (Luana Anders),
to get the matriarch of her dead husband's clan
the Hallorans to change her will. Louise fronts
up to Castle Halloran only to discover a family
more warped than she, living in thrall of the
death of young daughter/sister Kathleen, many
years previous. Kathleen had apparently drowned.
The family holds a strange ceremony every year
to commemorate the death. Flashbacks, nursery
rhymes, a decapitation, a wedding and a home invasion
by an axe weilding maniac follows as the film's
central mystery is awkwardly unravelled and it
all ends in tears. |
| Video |
| Probably the worst transfer of the shoddiest black
and white print we've yet to see commercially released
on DVD. The only remastering from a print that may've
played every drive-in from Peoria to Alice Springs,
is the inclusion of the MRA logo as a watermark
every few scenes. But that's really no distraction
as print scratches and blemishes are the real attention
grabbers here. |
| Audio |
| The sound is uneven (Coppola had apparently stuffed
the sound on The Young Racers)
and barely adequate and makes following the intricate
plot turns as difficult as following them visually.
Still, best sounding underwater radio in cinema
history. |
| Extra Features |
| None. |
| The Verdict |
| A proto-horror thriller that does demonstrate
some masterfully constructed tension and murderous
moments but they are few and far between and don't
sustain interest in the hastily concieved plot.
A curio at best and now more notable for the work
of Jack Hill who's credited as writing and directing
second unit before he went home to engineer his
supreme exercise in family dementia, Spider
Baby. Also of interest for the great work
of the late, great, and highly under-rated composer,
Ronald Stein. |
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