The New York-based Film Chest, Inc., via their HD Cinema Classics label, has released two films in DVD and Blu-ray combo-packs that have long been public domain eyesores, junking up the bottom rows of your local video store (you remember, the one that closed a while back) and thickening the VHS remainder bins. (You remember VHS, the cassette tapes, the things that looked a little like paperback books on your shelf.) Both DEMENTIA 13 (1963) and THE TERROR (1963) have a connection to Roger Corman — the latter being directed by Corman (for the most part – more on this later) and the former being produced by Corman and helmed by his once-upon-a-time protege, Francis Coppola — yes, the Francis Coppola, who went on to direct CAPTAIN EO (1986) and JACK (1996) and do some really great print ads for Mondavi wines and Louis Vuitton luggage and also had a hand in such obscure films as THE GODFATHER (1972), THE GODFATHER: PART II (1974), THE CONVERSATION (1974) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979). All right, all right, I’m messing with you… but these movies mess with you, too, so it all fits, believe me.

Or don’t believe me!

But seriously, back in the day, it was easy to get mad at these movies because they were everywhere and in such crappy condition that it was like watching them through a scrim of elementary school toilet paper.  The very thought of these movies so put you off that you wouldn’t even read about them in genre overviews because they felt so done to death. (I’m getting a little angry just thinking about it.) Of course, all of that rancor was unfair and the movies themselves were not to blame. Though both were low budget programmers aimed at the punters, they had value, something to say and killer casts, with Jack Nicholson taking an early starring role in THE TERROR opposite aging horror king Boris Karloff and the iconic likes of William Campbell, Luana Anders and Patrick Magee headlining DEMENTIA 13, which is just one of the best movie titles ever. Nearly fifty years after their theatrical debuts it’s high time for a reassessment now that both look so good.

Following a blackly comic curtain warmer, which plays like an EC Comics tale from the crypt (and was, in fact, shot in postproduction, when Corman demanded more exploitable material be added to the film), DEMENTIA 13 begins properly in Old Dark House mode, offering a standard grab-the-will plot out of an old silent creeper full of sliding panels, hidden motives and clutching hands. Taking its cue from PSYCHO (1960), the film thwarts audience expectations at the 35 minute mark, killing a major character — the only character in which viewers have been asked to make any investment of time — by dint of woodsman’s axe and associated homicidal maniac. Likely patterned after Hitchcock’s infamous shower scene, this lakeside carve-up is even gorier, with the near-nude victim’s bloodied hands clutching wet grass in her death throes as the axe blows rain down like Biblical punishment. Despite the doomed character’s essential venality, one’s sympathy is certainly with her in her agony and there’s something undeniably sickly about the sight of her lifeless body being dragged from the crime scene like so much raw meat. Even in 1963, body count movies were nothing new. As discussed a couple of weeks ago, classic movie monsters were accustomed to leaving corpse piles in their respective wakes back in the Forties and Fifties but DEMENTIA 13 really goes there in in depicting the trauma of murder. Though he would not return to the horror genre for nearly thirty years (with BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA in 1992), Coppola broached the ugly side of violence and its physical toll in a number of his subsequent big studio films.

As much as DEMENTIA 13 seems indebted to PSYCHO, Coppola stages some suspenseful setpieces and morbid tableaux that anticipate better-known bits in later films – in fact, the first murder sits rather comfortably from an historic perspective between Janet Leigh’s surprise demise in the earlier film and the first shark attack in JAWS (1975). The drowning death of a young girl and its effect on the family points to Nicolas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW (1973); Roeg, of course, shot Corman’s THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964). Later, a dead body is hung on a meathook, as in Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), strung up next to butchered sides of beef and pork a la Mario Bava’s FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON (1970); an intended victim cowering under a shower of wood fragments as a madman chops his way toward her anticipates the closet siege in John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978) while a character’s descent into a murky body of water and subsequent discovery of Something Really Weird feels like a pencil sketch for the immortal flooded ballroom scene in Dario Argento’s INFERNO (1980); the ghostly apparition of a long-dead little girl with golden tresses has an analog in Bava’s KILL, BABY… KILL (1966) while the placement of fish netting to divide the frame between living characters and what looks to be a dead’n flashes forward to set-ups in BAY OF BLOOD (aka TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE, 1971), Bava’s grab-the-deed body count thriller (and, it should be noted, an influence on Sean Cunningham’s FRIDAY THE 13TH and its sequels). I want to avoid spoilers as much as possible, especially for those among you who might by my recommendation come to this for the first time but the film ends with another look forward to HALLOWEEN, as a strange little man steps out of the shadows to fire a couple of well-placed rounds the villain’s way, saving the heroine in the nick of time.

THE TERROR has a reputation for being the movie Roger Corman made in only two days, because it was raining and he couldn’t play tennis… which of course isn’t true at all. In fact, THE TERROR turned out to be one of Corman’s most protracted productions, with principal photography being spread out over the course of a couple of years and divvied up between a number of directors, including Corman himself, Coppola, Monte Hellmann, Jack Hill (who had shot some additional material for DEMENTIA 13) and even star Jack Nicholson himself. The whole thing had gotten under way because Corman wanted to re-use Daniel Haller’s castle sets from THE RAVEN (1963) and because he had Karloff under contract for two more days. Grabbing Karloff’s scenes first (even just having the elderly actor walk up and down corridors, turning wall sconces and pulling on chains to active portcullises and open hidden rooms), Corman farmed out the remainder of the duties and kibbitzed from the sidelines.Because every chef who had his fingers in the pie modified the scenario somewhat, THE TERROR is often branded as being incomprehensible but that tireless canard is likely reflective more of copycat criticism than the film’s actual merits. THE TERROR follows a labyrinthine but not unfathomable narrative arc as it onion peels its way towards its grim resolution… but anyone making the sincere cry of “incomprehensible!” might as well confess they’ve never seen a ghost story before. With its ad hoc assembly the work of some dozen hands and the story no more contradictory than the average nightmare, THE TERROR pushes the art of collaboration towards the mystical realm of table tilting, with the finished product reflecting less a unified vision than an unconscious collective will.

Yet take away its Gothic blandishments and Freudian curlicues and THE TERROR is very much a detective story, with Nicholson’s Napoleonic cavalryman Andre Duvalier knocking down doors like a shamus as he trails the elusive Helene (Sandra Knight) through a grapevine of interested but less than candid parties. “I’ll ask the questions,” Duvalier informs shifty family retainer Stefan (Corman regular Dick Miller), who of course knows more than he lets on about past events that have shaped the present mystery. With his insatiable curiosity and disdain for liars, Duvalier is an obvious predecessor to Jake Gittes, the shady but resolute private dick Nicholson played so indelibly in CHINATOWN (1974) and somewhat less indelibly in its belated follow-up, THE TWO JAKES (1990). As the mendacious Baron von Leppe, Karloff could be seen as a pencil study for the hateful Noah Cross character played by John Huston in CHINATOWN. Both films have protagonist and antagonist locking antlers over a table of food and a female lead whose nature is split right down the middle; both share a water motif as well as a downbeat finish that finds their curious heroes unable, for all their savvy, to save the women they have come to love. That the much-lauded CHINATOWN might possibly have been informed in some small way by Corman’s “super quickie” (to quote British critic Alan Frank) is not so far fetched. CHINATOWN scribe Robert Towne had written and acted in Corman’s THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960) and provided the script for Corman’s masterful THE TOMB OF LIGEA (1964). Finally, it’s worth noting that, when producer Robert Evans and director Roman Polanski read Towne’s first draft for CHINATOWN, both considered the script – that word again – incomprehensible.

For the serious horror hound, these are must-have releases. Mind you, both have been restored from 35mm print sources rather than original negatives and both suffer from technical limitations (soft focus bordering on lack of focus) dating back to the original shooting… and yet the result is often exceedingly fine. The black-and-white DEMENTIA 13 looks wicked good, with moments of Criterion crispness…

… while the full color THE TERROR, stripped of multi-generational layers, is one of Corman’s more psychedelic descents into the maelstrom; the colors don’t just pop, they explode. THE TERROR also offers a last chance look at Boris Karloff on his own two feet, as the elderly actor, hobbled by arthritis, would ride out the rest of his career in a wheelchair. (Seeing this afresh, it strikes me that Karloff in THE TERROR might have been the specific model for the Baron Boris von Frankenstein character voiced by the actor in the 1967 Rankin/Bass MAD MONSTER PARTY?) Both DVD/Blu-ray combo packs come with scant extras, most notably brief demonstrations of the restoration process. These showcases for Film Chest, Inc. are fine as far as they go but it would have been more impressive to show how much the present transfers differ from prior releases, if only to demonstrate what a long, strange trip it’s been.