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1980 - USA Directed By: Arthur Jeffreys and Alex Rebar. Starring: Sallee Elyse, Harry Reems (as "Bruce Gilchrist"), Deborah Alter, Kathryn Clayton, Bryan Charles, Chip Matthews, Mark Justin, Robert Mendel, Douglas Price and Stephen Blood.
Current Availability
Not available on DVD. The uncut UK pre cert VHS on the Media label is fairly scarce and sought after. Used copies which turn up from time to time tend to change hands for fairly substantial sums. Dodgy DVD-R's (probably ripped straight from the pre cert tape) occasionally crop up on E-Bay too.
Recommended?
Not really recommended. This is a pretty dopey, sloppily executed exploitation picture. Suckers for the whole rape/revenge cycle might want to track it down but if you've seen Last House On The Left, I Spit On Your Grave or even William Fruet's criminally underrated Death Weekend then you've seen this formula done before and better.
Review
An obscure and largely forgotten entry to the familiar rape & revenge cycle of seventies and eighties exploitation filmmaking. Aficionado’s of trash cinema will know where they are with Demented, which spins the by this point rather predictable yarn of a young woman who is savagely raped then later snaps and takes brutal revenge of various unsavory men folk. Written and according to some sources co-directed by b-list actor Alex Rebar – most famous for his role as the Incredible Melting Man in erm… The Incredible Melting Man (1977) - Demented, unlike its contemporaries such as Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left (1972) and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave (1978) makes no pretence at a moral argument or message, instead pitching itself as straightforward exploitation all the way.
The plot centers around attractive Linda Rodgers (Elyse), whose life and sanity is destroyed when one day whilst tending to her horses she is horrifically gang raped in the stables by four thugs. After a period of recuperation at a mental institution Linda eventually returns home to her faithless surgeon husband Matt (Reems) who unbeknown to Linda has begun a very physical affair with her nymphomaniac sister Annie (Alter).
However, Linda is clearly mentally damaged by her ordeal and soon begins to suffer frightening hallucinations, imagining that her rapists (who are all serving jails terms for the crime) are still out to get her. Having noted Linda’s fragile mental state a group of local youths cruelly decide it would be fun to start terrorizing her, which they do by breaking into her house late at night when she is alone, donning masks and making various threats of further sexual violence. When Linda reports what has happened to Matt and to the police neither believe her and begin to further question her sanity. When the youths pay one more nocturnal visit to torment poor Linda, she finally snaps altogether and one by one she extracts a cruel and violent revenge on each of her youthful tormentors.
With the better known examples of the rape/revenge subgenre there is at least normally some semblance of an attempt to counteract accusations of misogyny for indulging in the spectacle of graphic sexual assault, by at least doling out a nasty comeuppance to the perpetrators of the crime. This is not true however of Demented where both rape and violent “feminist” retribution are one and the same, both proving part of the same exploitative bid to provide lowbrow titillation. The act of rape is used as nothing more than a nasty attention grabbing device and the wronged female’s “retribution” perpetrated against prank playing teenagers who aren’t even her rapists.
As easy at it would be to say bad things about a film as completely and utterly semi-professional as Demented (and I will no doubt say my fair share before this review is over), one must at least give both Rebar and director Arthur Jeffreys credit where it is due for at least the dup have their exploitation bases well covered from the outset.
Indeed, Demented dives right off at the deep end, presenting Linda’s gang rape as the films opening scene. While it never scales the graphic heights of Camille Keaton’s multiple violations in I Spit On Your Grave this is still nasty stuff replete with much bare breast mauling and sleazy grunting from the assailants who mask their identities by wearing pantyhose over their heads. By playing their hand so early however, Jeffreys and Rebar shoot themselves in the foot somewhat as nothing has been done to establish and sense of audience identification or sympathy for Linda. As a result the rape is just a mechanical (albeit pretty unpleasant) act perpetrated against a woman the viewer frankly couldn’t give two hoots about. These chaps might aswell be violating an inflatable love doll for all the impact the scene has.
Once the film settles down an attempt is made to convey Linda’s escalating dementia. Predictably though these scenes result in the makers reaching beyond their abilities and the results are badly bungled in their execution, scenes of Linda hallucinating about her rapists appearing suddenly in mirrors are actually quite comical in an unintentional sort of way. Unfortunately in addition Linda is depicted as being so blatantly off her rocker and is so insipid and shrewish in her general demeanor that it is very hard for the viewer to feel much sympathy or identification with her mental plight.
This is not helped in the slightest by the weak, over the top performance of Sallee Elyse, whose “acting” technique seems to revolve entirely around unconvincing screaming, theatrically hammy eye rolling and an occasional, woeful attempt at a dead faint when Linda’s “ordeal” becomes all too much for her. Elyse’s simpering melodramatics and inability to speak in anything other than a neurotic high-pitched whine soon becomes grating and tiresome. She acts as if she were depicting a spoilt, mommy coddled child mourning the loss of a favourite teddy bear, not a young woman coming to terms with life following a horrific gang rape ordeal. At one point she intones deadpan to her husband that “I was raped, I didn’t get a lobotomy”, but it is hard to imagine her ever having had much going on upstairs to begin with. Elyse is hard of the ear, hard on the nerves, but at least she is rather easy on the eye, which seems to have been the principal reason for her casting. At times it genuinely does seem that Elyse was hired mainly due to her talent for modeling an array of alluring nightwear as her every other scene rather amusingly seems to begin with her climbing either in or out of bed clad in some sort of slinky silk number, revealing plenty of leg and cleavage. As poor as she may be Elyse at least receives some capable support from an unlikely source is the shape of porn legend Harry Reems (appearing under the pseudonym Bruce Gilchrist) who at least does a serviceable job as Linda’s philandering hubby Matt who spends most of his time leaping into bed with Linda’s younger, more “willing” sister. I can’t say as I really blame the guy, if my wife was as irritating as his then I would probably be doing the same.
Fortunately when all seems completely lost, Jeffreys and Rebar finally decide to wake the unfortunate viewer up from their slumber in time for the modestly brutal finale. To be fair these scenes do deliver as a berserk Linda finally snaps and clad only in her best lingerie and stockings (an appealing site it must be said), systematically wipes out her unwelcome intruders. Even Elyse gives it the good old college try, making a quite astonishing transformation from a mousy, insipid housewife into a homicidal, unhinged, sex siren. The deaths she dishes out are pleasingly cold and sadistic as Linda dispatches the teenage reprobates with a shotgun, a meat cleaver and in the films show stopping highlight even castrates one using a coil of piano wire (ouch), all whilst giggling with an unnervingly deranged glee. Even Reems’ errant husband prepares to cop it as Linda lunges towards him with a bloody meat cleaver in one of those cheesy, overused freeze-frame endings that we all hate.
It is an inescapable point of contention however that Linda’s eventual victims are not her rapists but ultimately fairly harmless prank playing teenagers who unwittingly bite off a lot more than they can chew. The viewer never suspects that these four young hoodlums ever intended to do any more than put the willies up Linda (figuratively not literally) and as a result the mercilessly brutal fates they receive seem excessively harsh and rather undeserved. Intentionally or otherwise what little sympathy the viewer feels for anyone becomes placed with the tearfully pleading boys whilst Linda is turned into a ball-breaking, psychotic, cold blooded madwoman.
All in all Demented is not an especially good film. Thanks to a dreadful central performance and a pandering preoccupation with presenting the cheapest sort of sleazy titillation over anything of substance, Demented completely fails to engage the viewers emotional and gut responses on the same level as the more famous exploitation pictures it tries (and singularly fails) to emulate. Ultimately the name of the game proves to be paint by numbers exploitation with no ambition beyond serving up an unpleasant dish of graphic rape, topped off with seedy sex and nudity and finally dressed with a modest welter of brutality. Yet even to that lowly end Demented still winds up less than the sum of its parts, delivering on its exploitative premise but whilst barely impressing in the process.
Also Try… The Last House On The Left / I Spit On Your Grave / Straw Dogs / Death Weekend / Forced Entry (1975, Jim Sotos) / Scream For Vengeance! / Savage Streets.
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