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
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