Rainey Dawn This one isn't a bad film but I really was expecting to like it a lot more than I actually do - it's okay.The film tries to show a guilty conscious after doing some bad things - murdering! I do believe that a guilty conscious would produce nightmares and maybe even some hallucinations, those that do not feel guilt for their crimes could never experience this.It's kinda a throwback to the era of Silent Films... but with a narrator and a few sounds like laughter, crying - that sorta thing. The film does have the 1950's beatnik vibes to it, which I like. But overall I found the film rather droll and sometimes drab.4/10

meddlecore 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.

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.

MartinHafer The movie is about a day in the life of a woman who is going insane. To show that she is mentally ill, she overacts a lot and the narrator tells us she's "going mad". Along the way, she goes out with a fat guy who looks like he could be Orson Welles' brother and he later takes a header off a building in one of the only interesting moments in the movie.This is a strange little film that is very cheaply made--and it sure shows. The film was shot without sound (probably using 8mm or some other cheap type of film) and had some sound effects and an overbearing narration added later. In fact, the narration was the most obtrusive and unintentionally hilarious I have ever heard and it is said in such a silly and over-the-top manner you'd just have to hear it to believe it. As a result of these cost-cutting actions, it's not surprising that the film is bad, though the idea of trying to make this sort of film was pretty original. Plus, it's VERY hard to make it through the entire film.