One of the most deliberately weird exercises in the history of horror cinema, Daughter of Horror (aka
Dementia) plays like a surreal nightmare journey through the unraveling mind of a young woman (Adrienne Barrett), unfolding completely without dialogue -- and featuring legendary
Tonight Show second-banana
Ed McMahon as the omniscient narrator. After murdering her own father, Barrett is taken in by a wealthy, lecherous mystery man (the Devil?) who paws her relentlessly and manages to seize her necklace before she shoves him over a balcony to his death. Unable to free the necklace from his death grip, she is forced to amputate the man's hand to recover the evidence. After a subsequent evening of carousing in a jazz club, she awakens the next morning in a hotel room and concludes that the ghastly events were only a dream...or were they? This one-of-a-kind film broke virtually every established convention of horror filmmaking in its time (or any other, for that matter), generating terror solely through disorientation of the audience. Viewers will certainly draw parallels to
Roman Polanski's
Repulsion, which it predates by ten years; though it may lack the intensity of the latter film's vision, it is nevertheless an eerie, groundbreaking landmark among modern horror movies. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide