Demented (1980)

DEMENTED, takes you through the harrowing post traumatic stress felt by a woman after being gang raped! This is an obscure horror drama that slipped through the cracks but is definitively worth tracking down.

Linda Rogers (Sallee Young) is violently raped by four men in a horse’s stable. We later see her husband Matt, picking her up from the sanitarium more or less a month afterwards. The criminals are prosecuted and sent to jail but this is little comfort for the still delicate mental state Linda is in. The first hour or so of the film we get to know this traumatized woman. She has nightmarish flashbacks and several breakdowns while her philandering surgeon husband is fucking a younger, lusty woman who only seems interested in his money and furthering her acting career. Linda is often left alone and neglected while she pieces her life together.

 The worst thing happens next! A group of young men want to have some “fun” with Linda and break into her house at night. It is not made clear whether they were the original rapists from the beginning of the film. Linda devises a plan of her own. She won’t allow another dirty cock to violate her woman parts. The genius of the thing is that Linda’s plot is basically her becoming delusional and going out of her mind, instead of a thought out revenge scheme. She wears sexy lingerie and grabs a meat cleaver to have herself a little crazy fun of her own with the assholes. She welcomes them in, to their surprise; offering wine, and flirting with them. You can tell that she may not really know what the hell she is doing. The waves of madness and her behavior suggest she is losing her grip on reality. She becomes the danger, the predator!

Little by little she clears the house of vermin with her meat cleaver revenge tool. She ties up one of the final creeps and has dinner with him in one of the most fantastic and chilling scenes I have ever seen in a movie! She talks to the guy about how she cries during sad movies and asks him if he likes her breasts. You can tell the dude is shitting his pants, realizing he is in the company of a crazy bitch. Crazy and madness is the most wonderful form of intimidation. She kills him, as you can expect, and she has a little surprise of her own in store for her husband. This night his paramour presses him to tell his wife he is going to leave her. I don’t know how Linda found out of his infidelity. Maybe her meat cleaver told her, or the morbid angels in her mind? Regardless, the unsuspecting man is not going to like what awaits him behind the bedroom door!

This movie left me in awe! I consider this one of my top B-Movie rape and revenge films, right up there with LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. Sallee Young gives the performance of a lifetime, playing the broken down victim, spiraling into violent hysteria. Although the rape scene at the beginning is barely five minutes long, the psychological repercussions are felt throughout the rest of the film. Ive heard people say that Young has an annoying squeaky voice and that her acting chops are questionable. You know what, I don’t give a shit! I connected with her character and although she is no great actress, she leaves her heart and soul on the celluloid. I can’t praise this movie enough!

5 / 5 STARS

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1973)

 Bob Clark is known for mainstream comedies like PORKY'S and A CHRISTMAS STORY - but the dude also made BLACK CHRISTMAS, a proto-slasher , and one of my favorite horror films! Today I will be talking about a film he directed a year before BLACK CHRISTMAS . CHILDREN is a smart zombie film that goes to subtle dark places - blasphemous territory.

A group of actors, led by their eccentric director, Alan, decide to trespass on an island graveyard. Alan has planned a grand scheme of unholy depravity. They dig up the corpse of a man named Orville and the desecration of the dead is underway. For the most part, the others want nothing to do with this, but they are afraid of losing their position at the theater, so they go along with the madness. Alan pulls out a grimoire and chants demonic prayers to make the dead rise from their graves and make them servants. When nothing happens he is scoffed at by one woman that takes control and does her own satanic gibberish talk. Now praying to the almighty dark prince is one thing, but making a fool of him, well that’s dumb in every way. But that’s exactly what this crazy woman does. She taunts and mocks Satan for his apparent inaction.

They head to the groundskeeper’s home, now long abandoned, and bring Orville with them. Alan has a faux wedding ceremony in which he marries Orville and takes him up to a bedroom for their honeymoon?! One can’t possibly imagine something more gruesome or disrespectful. At about this time, the dead begin to rise out of the earth to make things right by killing the awful people that fucked around and disturbed things one should respect. In a panic, the group board up the house and try a counter-spell to restore things and save their asses. Things seem to work, but when they make a run for it, a swarm of zombies tear them to pieces. Orville has the pleasure of killing the depraved mad leader, Alan. Lesson learned: Children should not play with dead things!

The film mellows things out by adding humorous antics but the grim undertone remains. When Alan was praying to Satan it was a chilling scene. The zombies are not that menacing - but the really disturbing thing is Alan’s brazen disrespect. He should have been completely disemboweled on camera so we got to see true vengeance. All the characters are well developed and organic. The story is very interesting and the force of the narrative sets this movie apart from other zombie films. The character drama is where the center of the horror is. The zombies tie the loose ends.

There is a long segment at the beginning that really moves the story nowhere. It has to do with pranks and it delays the real action in the movie. I had a slight problem with the way the humor was introduced - it caused me to be annoyed with the characters and I thought I wasn’t going to like the movie. It is a good effort on Clark’s part; and although it has more of a cult appeal, I’m sure the average zombie buff will find something they enjoy here.

3 / 5 STARS