Movie Review: Dementia 13 (1963) directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Lady Haloran (Ethne Dunne) has summoned her family to their castle in Ireland for the annual commemoration of her daughter Kathleen’s death. Eldest son John (Peter Read) has sent his regrets, and his wife Louise (Luana Anders), as he has been forced to travel elsewhere on business. Middle son Richard (William Campbell), an aspiring sculptor, is joined by his American fiancee Kane (Mary Mitchel). Youngest son Billy (Bart Patton) has also returned from his American college.
What the family doesn’t know, but the audience does, is that John Haloran is dead of a heart attack. Louise has concealed this fact as if he predeceases his mother, Louise is cut entirely out of Lady Haloran’s will and won’t get even the modest percentage of the family wealth she was hoping for. Her one hope is getting Lady Haloran to change that will in her favor before John’s death is known, even if she has to fake a haunting to do it.
What Louise doesn’t know is that she’s not the only one with a dark secret who is willing to go to great lengths to get their way.
This was the official directorial debut of Francis Ford Coppola (he’d done a couple of porn flicks but they’re usually not counted on his resume.) Coppola had been a soundman on Roger Corman’s The Young Racers and was offered a chance to use the remaining budget from that production and a few of the still-contracted actors if he could come up with a script. Coppola wrote a script in three days that impressed Corman enough to greenlight the project.
The tiny budget and rushed schedule really show. The story is often a bit hard to follow, there are some production goofs, and the dialogue is dubious. Corman ordered some new scenes to be shot after the main production was complete–the version I saw still has the added comic relief character who gets decapitated, but not the prologue with a psychologist putting the audience through a questionnaire.
That said, there are flashes of brilliance that show Coppola’s promise as a director, particularly the scene where Louise ties dolls to the bottom of a pond. The actors, working for minimum wage or even “exposure”, are professional and doing their best with the dialogue they’ve been given. Patrick Magee is especially effective as family doctor Justin Caleb, who’s a jerk but determined to get to the bottom of the strange events at Haloran Castle.
Content note: There’s some gory violence and corpses (in black and white.) Also, Louise and Kane are both seen in their underwear and are shot in ways that suggest Coppola hadn’t quite gotten over his porn training.
Not the best movie by anyone involved, but it has some good points, and is short, so might make a decent half of a horror double feature. (Perhaps with another Corman production like Bucket of Blood?)
