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

Clare Quilty "Dementia"/a.k.a. "Daughter of Horror" is creepy fun. Nothing like you'd expect. It's surreal, like that part of "Glen or Glenda" where a room full of people mock poor Glen and then come at him with their fingers wiggling, only here it's scary instead of funny. The movie has no dialog, and if it did we'd probably die laughing. Marni ("King and I" "My Fair Lady") Nixon does the soprano obbligato throughout. There's an Orson Welles character in it, too. And a sofa with some laughing, half-dressed, blond broad out in a cemetery. Honest, I am not making this up.David Lynch has been borrowing from this one for years and none of us knew.

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.

Michael_Elliott Dementia (1955) *** (out of 4) Interesting mix of film noir, horror and German Expressionism has a young woman struggling to make it through one night on skid row. The movie features no sounds with the exception of a new sound effects so this is clearly a throwback to the silent days and more in point, the German classics of the era. This is a rather interesting little film due in large part to the brilliant look and the downright bizarre setup. We're treated to various visuals, which make little to no sense but I believe that was the point. I was shocked to see that the wonderful cinematography was by William C. Thompson who was pure poverty row as he worked on films like Maniac, Glen or Glenda?, Plan 9 From Outer Space and other Ed Wood movies. Adrienne Barrett is very good in the lead and Angelo Rossitto of Freaks fame has a small role. Technically the film is brilliant but the story doesn't come off as well.The most interesting thing about this film is its troubled history, which included being banned by the New York Censor Board. The film had to go in front of this board eleven times before it was allowed to be shown, only once. The film couldn't get released so it was re-edited and narration by Ed McMahon was added. The film was then re-released as Daughter of Horror and clips from this version can be seen in the 1958 film The Blob inside the theater where the teens are watching it.Daughter of Horror (1958) ** (out of 4) Alternate version of the above film has a couple scenes edited out but the biggest change is the added narration by Ed McMahon. As with other "silent" films that are given sound, the atmosphere and overall mood is certainly altered here but it's rather neat hearing McMahon's narration because he sounds so incredibly different than what we're use to hearing.