Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.

I first watched this movie in the best of ways. On our weekly webcast, Drive-In Asylum, we had the great opportunity to have Bret McCormick, director of The Abomination, as a guest. This was the movie that he chose to watch with us.

Director, writer and producer John Parker started this film as a short and then expanded it. He had been inspired by a dream that his secretary, Adrienne Barrett, had and picked her to star in the film along with Bruno VeSota, who would go on to star in several Roger Corman films.

Barrett plays the Gamin, a young woman who wakes up from a nightmare to be in another one. Newspapers scream that there was a mysterious stabbing, men try to assault her only to be beaten into oblivion by police and a pimp buys her a flower, then asks her to accompany a rich man (Ve Sota) as she dreams back to stabbing her abusive father after he had shot and killed her mother.

After an evening touring the city’s bars and nightclubs, they enter his elegant apartment where he ignores her attempts at seduction as he gorges on a huge meal. He finally attempts to attack her and she stabs him with the same blade that murdered her father and he plummets to the street, holding her necklace in a death grip. She saws off his hand as people watch without caring and the same cop appears that saved her in the alley, only now with the face of her father as she runs away, clutching the severed hand.

The pimp comes back to pull her into a jazz club, soon followed by the cop and the dead body of the rich man, whose bloody stump points her out as his killer. The audience surrounds her, laughing, as she wakes up back where she began, in the hotel room. She goes to put on her necklace and finds that its being held by a severed hand.

Dementia was briefly released in 1953 before it was banned by the New York State Film Board, who deemed it “inhuman, indecent, and the quintessence of gruesomeness.” Perhaps that’s because it’s a movie that shows the violence and fear that women live with every day, but goes further to have a heroine who strikes back with the kind of strength that seperates a man’s body part. Today, this would be considered an art film, or maybe even elevated horror, but in the 1950s, the only genre it could fit into was horror. When it was re-released in 1955, theater employees submitted medical examinations of patrons to “heart specialists” who would assure the theatergoers that they would not be frightened to the point of death. One of the big reasons why the 1955 re-release was troubled was that some areas of the country weren’t ready for the interracial dancing in the jazz club.

Originally, Dementia has no dialogue and only sound effects and a score by composer George Antheil, with vocal effects by Marni Nixon and jazz musician Shorty Rogers and his band the Giants performing in the night club scene. Jack H. Harris, who had a habit of getting films and re-releasing them — Equinox, Dark Star — added narration by Ed McMahon and release it as Daughter of Horror.

When we showed this, Bret was worried that our audience would hate it. After all, The New York Daily News said,  “The presentation, designed as a shocker, is enough to drive anybody crazy with alternate sessions of tedium and bedlam.” The good news is that it was received well, much like how Preston Sturges said, “It stirred my blood, purged my libido. The circuit was completed. The work was a work of art.”

Even if you haven’t seen this movie, you may have. It’s what’s playing in The Colonial Theater when The Blob attacks. And Faith No More used it as the inspiration for their video “Separation Anxiety.”

Supposedly, Aaron Spelling was one of the people in the nightclub. Did you see him?

The re-edit by Harris is strange to the ear, as you’re listening to the friendly voice of Carson’s sidekick saying things like, “Come with me into the tormented, haunted, half-lit night of the insane. This is my world. Let me lead you into it. Let me take you into the mind of a woman who is mad. You may not recognize some things in this world, and the faces will look strange to you. For this is a place where there is no love, no hope…in the pulsing, throbbing world of the insane mind, where only nightmares are real, nightmares of the Daughter of Horror!”

You can watch both cuts of the movie on YouTube.