05/07/06 Dementia 13

Dementia 13 (1963), directed by Francis Ford Coppola

watched solo; DVD (personal copy) @ car ride (from Bay St. Louis. MS to Citronelle, AL)

If you are at all a fan of cinema, and of great directors, like me...then usually you have a penchant for checking out those directors' earlier works to see where the genius comes from. Then again, sometimes you see how awfully bad those first attempts can be, humbling the notion of keeping these so-called geniuses up on a pedestal. This early Coppola work falls somewhere in the middle. I give him credit that he found a beautifully haunting old Irish castle to film at, and that he was reaching for some well-placed chills, as well as honing his shooting style. However, the acting is weak in a lot of places, and overall the characters became confusing for me (was it the sister who comes to dinner, or the wife, and the sister-in-law is the bitchy one...oh forget it). Basically there is a rather rich family in Ireland who live in a castle, while the one son John lives in the U.S. Upon his sudden heart attack, John's wife Louise decides that the only way for herself to be cut into the inheritance is to pretend John is away on business and go overseas herself to meet with the family and worm her way into the estate. Upon arrival to said estate, it is soon revealed that the family holds a dark secret of the sister's death by drowning in the backyard pond for many years now. Clinging to the past is the matriarch Lady Haloran, her battling sons Richard and Billy, and the nosy family psychiatrist Dr. Caleb. Trying to uncover the truth about the secrets is Louise, only to devastating consequences! Yikes! Part mysterious thriller, part slasher flick. A decent first attempt for Coppola...as he was only a decade removed from his eventual masterpiece "The Godfather." I guess we all have to start off making campy horror films though eh?

3 out of 5 stars