 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies, but before we get started, what are we drinking? Again, we're drinking Cannibal Farmhouse. It's a French farmhouse. Today we're going to be talking about 1963's Dementia 13, and this one is a request from Andy Riggs. This is the first film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, legendary director. We don't need to say what he's done, a master at his craft. It stars William Campbell, and he is in tons of these B horror movies produced by Roger Corman. He was also in the original Star Trek, twice, once as Trilane in the Squire of Gothos, and also as Koloth in Troubled Tribbles. He then reprised the role of Koloth in Deep Space Nine. Which is fucking awesome. Yeah. Luanna Anders is in this. She's a Corman mainstay, and Patrick McGee of course is in this, and he was in Tales from the Crypt. Dishwater. And Clockwork Orange. More wine? He's all being carried around by fucking David Brouse there. Dementia 13 starts off with this couple rowing a boat on the lake in the middle of night for some reason. John Halloran is doing the rowing, and he's telling his wife Louise that basically his mother is rich. When she dies, she plans on just donating all of her money to a charity. She's kind of not cool with this. Bit of a heated argument, and as he's rowing, I guess between the rowing and the arguing, he has some heart attack. And as he's kind of dying, he tells her, if I die before you, you get nothing. Then he just dies. So what does she do, responsible wife? Just dumps the body in the fucking lake, goes home and writes a fake letter from him to his mother saying, I'm going away on business, Louise is going to come and visit. She goes and visits his mother and the family in Ireland. She's rich, she has this big castle in Ireland, Castle Halloran. Love to own a castle. Heavy awesome. Little drafty, but I'm sure besides that it would be awesome. You could get into the king's wine cellar and everything. We meet the family here at Castle Halloran. John has two brothers, and one of the brothers has a fiance. We also find out they had a sister that accidentally drowned seven years ago, and the mother is still super distraught about this. They hold some sort of ceremony once a year to kind of like remember her and pay tribute to her. And every year is the same thing. Mother goes and puts flowers on the grave and faints. Oh, it happens every year. The mother claims that as soon as she put the flowers on the grave, they died instantly. Louise sees that the mother is mentally unstable and kind of wants to take advantage of this. She takes all these dolls that were in Kathleen's old room, have them come up into the water to kind of scare mom. Scuba dives because she sees like a tombstone almost. It says, forgive me, Kathleen, a corpse. And she freaks out and comes up. She looks up, feet standing there, the axe that comes and raises and just kills her. There's a poacher that's been wandering on the ground, starts seeing things in the woods. He starts to kind of follow. An axe comes out of nowhere and just chops him right up and chops his head right off. And you see his whole head come off and go rolling away. Like, holy shit. Meanwhile, the doctor is starting to get pretty inquisitive. He's asking a lot of questions about the family. He also takes one of the brothers to the local pub, too, to try and get more information. Getting the brother all drunk, too. Yeah, drink up. Yeah, drink up. He's getting all that brandy. Looks like a nice pub. I'd want to drink there. Yeah, me too. He learns that the brother ended up having a little bit of a mishap with the sister. He ended up dying. There's a wedding that's going on, too, with one of the other brothers. Everybody's all having a good time and the doctor's all around asking more questions. Pissing everybody off. Yeah, like, Columbo? Yeah, I know you don't like me, but yeah, he's super like Columbo, yeah. Everybody's all annoyed by him. He ends up getting away from the wedding party, the festivities, and he gets into this, like, this outbuilding, this shed, finds the body of Kathleen's wax figure. Looks like she's been perfectly preserved. That's where we're going to end the plot. So if you want to see what happens in dementia 13 with the family, with this axe murder who's running around and with the doctor, keep watching. As we mentioned before, this is Coppola's first movie and it's produced by Roger Corman, the king of the B movie. Coppola had worked with Corman before as like a sound guy. Like a lot of people, they get their start working for Roger Corman and you kind of go up the ranks, right? Yeah. Jack Nicholson did it. A lot of people did it. Corman wanted to make a kind of a psycho rip-off type movie and said, yeah, write me a script. Coppola wrote the script in one day and sent it to Corman. He's like, okay, here's $22,000. Go make the movie. You can tell by watching this that it is somebody who knows what they're doing. It looks better than most cheap B Corman movies. It's got something a little extra, something special. It's got the it factor to it. You can tell that Coppola's hungry. Yeah. At this point. And he's more of a visionary. He's not just putting the camera up and shoot it. Like he's coming up with neat shots. Yeah. He's doing things different, right? The movie was actually filmed in Ireland, which is actually quite amazing because they could have filmed it really anywhere. Yeah. Seeing they want to make it cheap. Yeah. Why go to Ireland and spend money flying people over and equipment and all that stuff? It makes no sense, but I mean Coppola, I guess, really wanted the authenticity of it. And it kind of does show. Like you see the actor's breath and stuff like that. Like it's cold. Helps with the whole sort of haunted castle setting. And it is a great setting. Like I love those old castle settings. Yeah. It's so good. You're right. The fact that they actually went the extra mile. Miles. Yeah. To shoot in Ireland helps because you really get that cold feeling, that big haunted castle. Like, yeah, you're right. They could have shot it anywhere. It wouldn't have been as effective if they just shot it in some farmhouse in Ohio or something, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That Ireland setting really helps. Yeah. The mystery of this movie is great. Murder mystery, right? Yeah. And you throw in the money. Well, you got a perfect reason. And the dead daughter, which could be a ghostly type thing. So you got the murder, the money, the ghost, the haunting. You got a perfect horror movie. It's a good stew ruin here. Exactly. And the mystery starts from the get go, like from the first scene. Well, you know that she's not in the will. Yeah. Was this by chance a heart attack or did she have something to do with inducing this heart attack? Yeah, you don't really know. You don't really know. You never, honestly, you never really find out. Nobody else in the movie knows that he's dead. No, not no. No one knows. No. No one ever finds out he's dead. His wife did a great job of covering it up, but then she kicks the bucket too. So then that whole segment. That whole storyline is done. Dead, yeah. Which is neat because you think she's the main character. Nope. She's the first one to die. It's a great twist, right? Exactly. So then you know that it's not Louise doing anything. Right. It's somebody else. For 1963, the kills in this movie are... Yeah, they're fucking great. 80 Slasher kills. 20 years before there were 80 Slashers. Axe murderer. Fucking chopping people up. You see the heads rolling. Hitchcock couldn't even go there for psycho. Three years later they can show heads coming right off and rolling away. Holy fuck. And it looks good for 1963, man. That's pretty good. Like the only movie I can think of that is much gorier than this in this time period might be Night of the Living Dead. Ahead of its time in more ways than one. I really think this is the prototype to 80 Slashers. Axe murderer. You got good kills. You got that scene with the poacher. 80 Slasher. Like, he's gonna get it. You know he is. The bumbling idiot. But when is he gonna get it? That whole like, that guy's gonna get killed. But when? I can't think of a movie before this where that kind of happens where you're like, yeah. Yeah, you know it's gonna come. Interesting that like a master director like Francis Ford Coppola goes on to do these brilliant movies. Also laid the prototype for shitty B-movie 80 Slashers. Hey, yeah. The cast is fucking great too. And they all deliver perfectly. They all have something to add to the story, nice and concise. Yep. Because the movie's only an hour and 15 minutes long. Super short, yeah. And it's exactly what it needs to be. Each one of them gets their own little mystery piece. Any one of them can be the killer. Because they all have a motive. Because they all want money. They all want mom's money. And when you look at the doctor, what he adds to the movie, he's almost a little bit like a Loomis character. He is the Loomis character. In Halloween, right? Because he's kinda hunting. He's kinda waiting. He knows somebody in the family is doing this. He's a family doctor. Exactly. He's gotta go and get one of them. He's got the gun. He's fucking ready to shoot it. I shot him six times. This man. He's not a human. Patrick McGee steals the show. Yeah, he does. He is so good at being that kind of inquisitive, pissing you off type, Columbo character really is what he is. Yes, but I love how he means business though. He's right. Like he's serious. Yeah, he's there to solve a fucking problem. They're all good, but he really steps it up. If you didn't have Patrick McGee, I don't think that the movie would have felt as important. No. Especially with the ending, right? It fucking delivers. Exactly. He is the delivery, right? Yeah, and it really is like the Donald Pleasants. Because if Halloween didn't have Donald Pleasants, it wouldn't have felt the same. That's exactly the same. The score for this movie, again, is really good. And it's haunting and it's ear piercing. Those strings and everything is like, you're like, oh, fuck. Like out of tune. Like it really makes you feel uneasy. And it's supposed to, right? It does its job. The camera work in this is really good. For a B movie, tell Coppola is positioning the camera in a specific way to make you feel a certain way. It's all thought out. He's doing things for a reason. Not just set it up, shoot and cut it. It's kind of an important movie, you know? Yeah, it's important in horror. Yeah, it's set a lot of standards, I think. In B horror, it's not psycho. It is the B psycho. Which is what it was supposed to be. It would be an A-list movie if it wasn't for cutting some corners here and there. But that's what Roger Corman was known for. So how can it be a Corman movie without cutting corners? So if you want a good classic movie that really started a trend to see where it all began without dementia 13, there may not be a Halloween. Or a Friday the 13th. So if you want to see where that all started, check it out. Yep, it certainly gives psycho a run for its money. And until next time, keep drinking.