Format: Various sources, various players.
Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are going to be at least vaguely aware of the existence of Bruno VeSota (or Bruno Ve Sota, as he is sometimes credited). Buttery fat dude VeSota appeared in five MST experiments, most notably to me personally as the chubby club owning foil of Daddy-O. He did one or two notable films, though, perhaps none more bizarre than Dementia from 1955, a film that, at 56 minutes, straddles the border of short and feature-length. What is most noteworthy about this film is the fact that there is no real dialogue included.
Dementia is very clearly an experimental film, if the lack of dialogue didn’t already indicate that. To put it bluntly, this film is an exploration of a descent into madness, a sort of fever dream following the experiences of an unreliable narrator and a bizarre and terrifying evening she spends in and around a seedy hotel, reliving her abusive past, and perhaps committing crimes in the present.
Our main character is unnamed and called only “The Gamin” (Adrienne Barrett). She awakens in a run-down hotel and wanders out into the night, buying a newspaper that tells the story of a mysterious stabbing murder. After a few random encounters, she winds up in the car of a wealthy man (Bruno VeSota), who takes her to a few bars and eventually back to his apartment. Along the way, she relives her own traumatic past, including killing her father (Ben Roseman) with a knife after he killed her mother (Lucille Howland). She watches him eat, and when he comes on to her, she stabs him and pushes him out the window—and he grabs her pendant from her neck as he falls.
Did she kill him? Is it a nightmare? It’s impossible to tell, and impossible to know of the cop who seems to keep showing up in her life—and who resembles her father—is actually there or not.
What is there, though, is a soundtrack that will make you want to stab your eardrums. It’s typical for the time madness music—lots of swelling chords, loud brass, and a woman screaming “Ahhhhh!” in various operatic notes. I get that for what it is, but a better soundtrack for this would make the experience a hell of a lot more palatable.
In the 1970s, the BBC made a yearly short film to be aired around the holidays called “A Ghost Story for Christmas.” The films ranged from 30-60 minutes in length more or less and were essentially a sort of oral/visual telling of a classic spooky story. If you’re familiar with the lyrics of the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” the part about scary ghost stories is evidently a real tradition in the U.K. In addition to being a religious holiday, the end of the year was evidently a time to share scary tales to freak out the kiddies.
The series ran from 1971-1978 (and a few have popped up in the last 20 years). The tale for 1972 was called A Warning to the Curious, and it follows the sort of pattern that other short tales like this do, at least the British ones. There’s a lot of similarity here to a film like Whistle and I’ll Come to You. We begin with an archaeologist (Julian Harrington) digging in a remote area on the British Isles. He is accosted by a man (John Kearney) about what he is doing, and soon enough, the man is beating the archaeologist to death.
We jump a dozen years into the future, which in this case puts us in the middle of the Great Depression. An amateur archaeologist named Paxton (Peter Vaughn) has arrived in the same area. We learn eventually that Paxton has lost his job and has decided to see if he can make a major discovery. There is a legend of three crowns of East Anglia, buried and lost, and said to protect the islands from invasion. The legend says that if the three crowns are disturbed, Britain would then be subject to invasion, and two of the crowns have been located and destroyed. So, naturally, this is what Paxton is looking for—the third missing crown, the discovery of which could be disastrous.
It's a nice little spook story. It’s slow, but that’s intentional. This isn’t about a gross out or about jump scares, but about building up an atmosphere where things are just a little bit off and become increasingly more off as time goes on. Is the crown actually there? Is it completely unguarded? Or is it protected by something best left alone? There are much worse ways to spend 50 minutes, and while it’s not scary in the traditional sense, it is a film that causes both pause and some reflection, and maybe a sense of touching something darker and deeper in the world around us.
It's interesting when two films of the same name are released at relatively the same time. There were two completely separate films called The Harbinger in 2022, for instance, and two movies called Swan Song the previous year. In 1928, a French film company and an American one both made versions of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
The French version of the story is a traditional film in the sense that it’s more than an hour long and really follows the story that Poe wrote. This version is the American production. It’s just shy of 13 minutes long and is heavily influenced by the German Expressionist style of filmmaking. While it has a lot of interesting shots and Dutch angles, it doesn’t have a great deal that is coherent.
In the story, an unnamed visitor (co-director Melville Webber) comes to the home of his old friend Roderick Usher (Herbert Stern). He finds his friend withered and sickly, with senses that have become so acute that they are painful. Roderick’s sister Madeline (Hildegarde Watson) is wasting away and appears to die. Not realizing that she is in a catatonic state, Roderick puts her in the family crypt, and when she wakes up and realizes where she is, she is driven insane and hunts out her brother for revenge.
That’s the story. If you watch this film and know the story, you can more or less vaguely follow along with what is happening on the screen. If you don’t know the story at all, there’s no way that you’re going to get that from what is on the screen. This is clearly an experimental film, and a great deal of what is happening appears to have been done as a way to learn how to perform a number of film techniques. It feels less like an experimental film and more like an actual experiment, a sort of training exercise. In that respect, it’s at least partially (but not wholly) successful.
Here's the thing—this version of The Fall of the House of Usher is short, but it’s incoherent. The version from the 1960s featuring Vincent Price is the one that you want.
Why to watch Dementia: It’s an hour of filmed insanity and schizophrenia.
Why not to watch: The soundtrack.
Why to watch A Warning to the Curious: Like many a British horror short, it’s all about the atmosphere.
Why not to watch: The end is a bit unsatisfying.
Why to watch The Fall of the House of Usher: At least it’s short.
Why not to watch: If you don’t know the story, this won’t tell it to you.
I just found a 1919 short film of Frankenstein on YouTube. I might watch that before I watch the new one by GdT.
ReplyDeleteIt's one of those films not unlike the version of The Fall of the House of Usher reviewed here. If you don't know the story, the movie isn't going to help a great deal.
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