Dementia 13 (1963)

I watched the remake first, that's a bit a** backwards and I don't usually but I wasn't blown away. I considered it messy and rushed.I had high hopes for this original, being Francis Ford Coppola's directorial debut and the fact I've heard it's name uttered many times over the years.Sadly though the remake is quite different this hardly impressed me either, in fact I'd say the remake is better (And that's something I rarely say).It all looks perfectly neat and the performances are better than you'd normally expect from an early sixties movie but the story is still messy.Honestly I don't know what the hell they were doing when they made the remake as the two are very very different films, and truth be told neither are worth folks time.The Good:Looks good for a movie of its timeStrong performancesThe Bad:Messy plotThings I Learnt From This Movie:Willbe is one wordAn axe is standard issue with windup monkey toys

I can say this is scary and suspenseful in its own slow moving way. But too many points in the plot just don't make any sense. Louise pretends her husband didn't die and was thrown to the bottom of the pond just to claim an inheritance from her mother in law, but she is very much alive and not planning to check out soon. Louise also swims and dives in the pond at night with some dolls to leave where Kathleen drowned, but why? The family doctor gets suspicious and drains the pond to see if Kathleen really drowned there. But only the shrine is discovered. Kathleen's body isn't there, but why didn't they find Louise's husband John? It's too bad we don't have message boards to get answers about parts of weird movies like these that don't make sense. The real killer is given away with hints, but finding out is a surprise. I would have thought revealing Louise's husband as the murderer would be more scary and surprising. Maybe he didn't really die or his ghost came back. But that might have been one of the ideas people could be bluffed into thinking to watch the whole movie until the end.

John and his wife Louise Haloran (Luana Anders) have an unpleasant time together rowing a boat. He dies of a heart attack and she dumps his body in the water. She stands to lose everything because of his and his mother's Wills. So she tells everybody that he's away on a business trip. She must take care of his mother-in-law before she dies leaving everything to a charity for her daughter Kathleen dead for 7 years. Louise fakes an invite to the annual family remembrance for Kathleen.The plot is confusing. The motivation of Louise is barely decipherable. The movie is a bit of a mess. It's disappointing considering that it is both written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola in one of his earlier efforts. Although one must remember that this is a Roger Corman production. He's even copying Psycho in killing off the blonde female lead halfway through the movie. There is an attempt at spooky atmosphere with filming in and around an English manor. It never builds anything close to that. It's mostly a low-budget boring ax-murdering slasher horror. The kills aren't scary but there is some blood-splattering head-rolling fun.

Arriving at a family gathering, a series of weird accidents befalls the family who soon find that a vicious killer with a startling secret is among them and have to fight to get out of the house alive.This one here is a really lackluster affair. The fact that this one contains some really big plot-holes really stands out. The most easily-spotted one is that the whole family has a way to get in touch with while away as she provided them with an address during introductions but none of them feel the need to correspond during the time. The reasoning isn't that effective to warrant no one wanting to check up on it, and as there's a way to check it out for authenticity, that's a little hard not to believe. There's several others as the jumbled nature of the story is also a problem since it seems like three separate stories rolled into one. The inheritance plot starts off the film, then switches gears to get to the murder mystery and then becomes a rather weak psycho-thriller with a police investigation. This really could've been cleared up a little easier to make it more understandable. The last real flaw is that it's really way too slow. The murders don't start occurring until almost the last act and there's not a whole lot of action before that. This really should've included a little more into it to get the action rolling and instead it plays long sections with nothing going on. This one does manage a few good moments here and there, as the opening scene is quite memorable as a man and a woman argue as they take a rowboat onto a lake. With music blaring from their transistor radio, the man has a heart attack and the woman promptly disposes of him and the radio overboard, finishing with a great shot of the man hitting the bottom of the lake along with the radio which is still playing. The initial murder is a truly shocking and totally unexpected scene, as it occurs just at a moment when the initial story is starting to take shape, and you don't see it coming. It also manages to boast some very gory and quite strong murders, including a graphic ax hacking in a scene ingeniously shot up from under the surface of the water and a decapitation that shows one the victim's decapitated head goes bouncing down into the water. The shots of the large Gothic castle inspire some nice atmospheric shots, and along with a few other really nice scenes, comprise the film's good points. Overall, though, this one is pretty lackluster.Today's Rating-PG: Violence.