A Quiet Place Day One 2024 - Movies (Oct 2nd)
Cabrini 2024 - Movies (Oct 2nd)
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This was a tad eccentric but proved to me a very delightfully surreal horror film. In watching this, you immediately get the feeling the director has both interesting, out-of-the-ordinary ideas plus the balls to do things his own way. It's flawed, but definitely shows plenty of directing chops and potential for brilliance, just a few years down the road. A bona-fide, low-budget, American classic.
***Coppola’s version of “Psycho,” sort of*** After the sudden death of her husband, an American woman (Luana Anders) keeps it secret and tries to ingratiate herself to the matriarch at the family’s manor in Ireland in order to extort part of the inheritance. But there’s a dark pall over the family after an accidental drowning seven years earlier, not to mention the specter of a psycho with an axe! William Campbell plays the strange brother and Mary Mitchel his fiancée. Shot in B&W, “Dementia 13” (1963), aka “The Haunted and the Hunted,” was the theatrical debut for writer/director Francis Ford Coppola after producer Roger Corman offered him to do a low-budget imitation of “Psycho” (1960) in Ireland with funds left over from his movie “The Young Racers,” on which Coppola worked as a sound technician. Actually, this wasn’t technically Coppola’s first film as he did eleven days shooting of Corman’s superior “The Terror” in Big Sur, California. The story and setting are very different from “Psycho” and its sister English film “Horror Hotel” (aka “The City of the Dead”), which was produced/released at the same time as “Psycho,” although it wasn’t released in America until two years later. Nevertheless, “Dementia 13” is cut from the same B&W horror cloth and shares an infamous plot twist that originated with those two films. Like “Psycho,” there’s a psycho madman, although he prefers an axe to a butcher knife. Unfortunately, “Dementia 13” isn’t great like “Psycho” or formidable like “Horror Hotel,” mainly because the story is sorta befuddling (like the two bodies of water that aren’t properly differentiated), although most everything’s explained at the end. There’s a good gothic ambiance, but the bewildering storytelling prevents the flick from taking off. And Luana Anders, while okay, is second rate compared to the breathtaking Venetia Stevenson in “Horror Hotel” and Janet Leigh in “Psycho.” Corman wasn’t happy with what Coppola brought home to California. He (rightly) insisted that certain scenes needed simplified and that more violence was necessary, to which Jack Hill was hired to shoot the additional poacher scenes. A useless prologue was also tacked on to beef-up the runtime, which wasn’t featured on the version I watched. If you’re familiar with Coppola’s later work, like “Youth Without Youth” (2007) and “Twixt” (2011), you know that he has the tendency to overcomplicate scripts. That’s the problem with “Dementia 13.” Still, it definitely upped the slasher ante and influenced that particular horror genre. The film runs 1 hour, 15 minutes and was shot in Ireland (Howth Castle, Howth, and Ardmore Studios in Bray). It was remade and improved in color in 2017. GRADE: C
After Lord Archibald Marion is brutally murdered by an unknown assailant, his bitter and feuding family members gather for a reading of the will, setting into motion an increasingly chilling series of deaths when their arrival is marked by a second grisly killing.
In the sixteenth century, Francis Barnard travels to Spain to clarify the strange circumstances of his sister's death after she had married the son of a cruel Spanish Inquisitor.
Lady Caroline Faye meets Lord Vane Brecon and is attracted to him. When she finds out that he is being accused of a murder he did not commit, she sets out to prove him innocent
While dabbling in Satanism, Count Karstein resurrects Mircalla Karnstein who initiates him into vampirism. As a rash of deaths afflicts the village, Gustav the head of Puritan group leads his men to seek out and destroy the pestilence. One of his twin nieces has become inflicted with the witchcraft but Gustav's zeal and venom has trapped the innocent Maria, threatening her with a tortuous execution, whilst Frieda remains free to continue her orgy of evil.
A prisoner in a state-of-the-art penitentiary begins to question the purpose of the emotion-controlling drugs he's testing for a pharmaceutical genius.
When young Lili's mother dies in childbirth, her father remarries Lady Claudia, a woman ruled by an evil mirror with the power to make her queen of all living things. After escaping an attempt on her life, Lili finds herself lost in a dark forest, where living happily ever after seems unlikely.
In the Seventeenth Century, while Hungary is fighting the Turks, the population of a small village in...
One year later, Michael Myers' traumatized young niece is horrified to discover she has a telepathic bond with her evil uncle... and that he is on the way back to Haddonfield to begin the carnage again.
On the eve of her 17th birthday, Mari and friend Phyllis set off from her family home to attend a rock concert in the city. Attempting to score some drugs on the way, the pair run afoul of a group of vicious crooks, headed up by the sadistic Krug.