Review of Demented

Demented (1980)
2/10
Ow ow ow
5 October 2013
This is one of those movies that's so bad it's just bad--too plodding, amateurish, gore-free etc. etc. to really be any fun--but it still has some qualities so atrocious they're worth a look, preferably if you're watching with a heavy finger on the fast-forward.

The main thing is the main "actress," who is so awful you can't imagine what they were thinking in casting her. She has a vocal range that goes from screetch to mousy squeak to whine--she'd be ideally cast as a disembodied voice used to drive someone crazy simply because it's SOOOOO annoying. Her (presumably in-character) personality is allowed to be almost equally off-putting; it's amazing how little sympathy we feel for a woman on thin mental ice after being gang-raped, because as played "Linda" is alternately clingy and tantrum-throwing when she's not just running around screaming.

Frankly, I kind of assumed all the actors here were moonlighting porn performers, because male lead Harry Reems (working under a pseudonym) is one; but it turns out the other actors I looked up on IMDb don't even have that excuse for giving less-than-pro-level performances. (In fact Reems embarrasses himself marginally less than anyone else here.) Some of the dialogue just seems arbitrary, as if they were trying to pad the runtime with more yakking to cover up the fact that the violence is so poorly and non-graphically handled.

There's very little logic at work: we never find out how the original rapists got caught, or who they were--let alone SPOILER!--why the nice neighborhood kids who later menace Linda would think scaring a recently gang-raped woman would be a harmless "joke." (Or how at the end Linda figures out something her husband has kept secret.) It's all monumentally dumb, though a slicker and more energetic film would have been required to actually make this an ENJOYABLE ridiculous/bad movie.

Nevertheless, I'll probably never forget lead Sallee Young's performance. Though believe me, I will try. You might want to check five minutes or so of her on YouTube (any scene where she's screaming/menaced is best) just to hear that fingernails-on-chalkboard voice. Funnily enough, it seems her only other substantial role was also as "Linda" in another almost unwatchably bad early 80s horror film, "Home Sweet Home" with "Body by Jake" Steinfeld giving an almost equally ludicrous performance as a crazed killer.
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