Shot entirely without dialogue and filled with suggestive violence and psycho-sexual imagery, it’s a surrealist film noir expressionist horror following the nocturnal prowling of a young woman haunted by homicidal guilt.
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This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
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
DAUGHTER OF HORROR seems to be a cult 1950s low budget thriller held in high regard by other viewers of it, but I'm afraid it's the kind of film that left me cold throughout. I'm not really a huge fan of cult or experimental film-making as so often the directors concentrate on technical qualities and forget to entertain their viewers in the meantime, and that's the case here.The film is about a young woman whose journey takes place over the course of one night. She's assaulted psychologically and physically by various characters including her own family members and various small-time hoods and pimps. Occasionally a disturbing flashback will reveal her state of mind and the reasons for it. There's no dialogue in the film other than the sonorous narrator who constantly tells you what to think and feel, and that's the part that annoyed me the most. The film might have been better off without him. The photography is pretty good and creates a nightmarish atmosphere at times but overall I have to count this as a failure, albeit an interesting one.
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.
I watched Daughter of Horror, not the original version called Dementia. Of course the newer version has a voice over by Ed McMahon of Star search/Johnny Carson fame. Dementia had no voice over.Neither film had dialog. The only thing you heard was the music of George Antheil. You watched as the faces of the actors gave the story. A woman (Adrienne Barrett) possessed by madness; the daughter of a philandering mother and a drunken father who murdered her, even as she murdered her father.It was Luis Buñuel and Orson Welles throughout. Even the character of the rich man (Bruno VeSota) was channeling Orson Welles.It is a bohemian rhapsody wrapped in madness. A strange but compelling film.