Deranged

If your like me and are a fan of old 80's horror movies, then you will really appreciate watching this movie. When I usually watch movies of this time and genre my expectations are low, because I'm just looking for something to laugh at. But trust me, you won't be laughing at this movie. It's certainly frightening and completely, Deranged!

Compulsion rip-off about a young woman who is left alone in her apartment. An intruder breaks in and tries to kill her, but she manages to defend herself and kill the intruder. However, after killing the intruder she starts to have weird visions and starts to see things that are not there. And with each passing day she grows more and more violent. Cheaply made film with a mostly porno cast playing it straight is far better then anyone would expect. It is decently made and acted and has its far share of twists and turns, but ultimately the extremely low budget & lack of originality hampers it.

Rated R; Violence, Nudity, Sexual Situations, and Profanity.

A mentally unstable pregnant woman murders an intruder and goes berserk in her apartment. This movie plays out like a poor man's redux of "Repulsion" or "Images." It lacks both of those films' subtleties and expertise behind the camera. That isn't to say it is completely without merit. The set consists mostly of a small apartment and this creates an effective feeling of claustrophobia. Veronica Hart is rather fantastic. She gives a better performance than I ever would have expected and anchors this movie. The supporting cast is also very good. It's a highly entertaining and icky movie, and pretty impressive considering the lead cast and director primarily worked in porno.

My review was written in May 1987 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

The team of filmmaker Chuck Vincent and actress Veronica Hart (credited here under her real name, Jane Hamilton) scoe respective tour de force stints in "Deranged", an innovative thriller simply not suited to today's market. Duo achieved something of a breakthrough six years ago with the crossover porn film "Roommates", but "Deranged" is neither the expected exploitation film nor a pedigreed art picture and thus is unlikely to reach either extreme of the audience spectrum.

Taking the unpromising premise of a woman going crazy and suffering escalating hallucinations (most similar forerunner being Robert Altman's "Images"), Vincent draws upon his legit theatrical background in creating a claustrophobic atmosphere for his story. After brief opening scenes in which Hamilton's husband goes off to London and her resentments of her sister (Jennifer Delora) and patrician mother (Jill Cumer) become evident, virtually the rest of the film is played out in Hamilton's New York City apartment.

Accosted by a burglar clad head to toe in black, she kills the intruder in self-defense a la "Dial M for Murder" with a pair of scissors. This traumatic incident causes her hallucinations to multiply rapidly until the viewer is not sure what is real and what is merely a projection of the heroine's fears and memories.

Vincent audaciously uses lengthy takes (recalling Alfred Hitchcock's experiment with "Rope") and a dollying camera that prowls past walls into every room of the apartment, while characters constantly enter or disappear just out of camera range. Even elements of kabuki theater are integrated into the format, as the black-clad intruder reappears and skulks around the apartment, dodging Hamilton's real visitors yet visible to her and the audience. This elaborate technique provides several elegant transitions within a shot to move between various periods of the heroine's life as well as spatially, as in the recurring surprise appearances of her psychoanalyst interrogating her in the living room she imagines to be his office.

Though there are some weak segments, the film overall holds one's interest and builds suspensefully to a violent conclusion. Hamilton, on screen almost constantly, handles her lengthy monologs very well and really shines in the eventual transition from tormented heroine to unhinged avenger with a strange look in her eye. Rest of the cast, which includes porno vets Jerry Butler and Jamie Gillis as her husband and father (billed under different names), is okay in functional capacities.

I never would have guessed that a somewhat-mainstream feature film made by and starring adult film industry personalities would yield an almost impressive result. That said, DERANGED is a semi-experimental project which is not without glaring flaws(mostly in regard to its stagy presentation and the vague, inconclusive closing shot)...but a damned good college try, at any rate.

As stated in other reviews, there is heavy REPULSION influence in this grim story of an heiress who goes 'nanners in her NYC apartment. Is her lowbrow Brooklynite husband plotting to kill her? Did her loving "Daddy" touch her "wrong"? Is everyone who ever met her out to get her money? These questions arise and are half-answered in a consecution of vignettes staging paranoid scenarios ripped straight from the mind of a borderline madwoman.

Quite violent at points, and off-base enough to potentially galvanize a small cult audience, DERANGED is a film which will appeal to some and completely repel others. I'd say give it a go, especially if your personal tastes are deemed "questionable" by family and friends. 5/10.

*footnote- Rather eerie is a shot during the opening credits, of a graveyard with the World Trade Center in the distance. Quite an omen!