DEMENTIA 13 (2017) **

Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 is in the public domain so virtually anyone with a video camera can remake it.  The same goes for Night of the Living Dead.  However, Night is kind of a sacred cow among horror fans.  Coppola’s film on the other hand had a fun twist, but overall was a tad uneven and frustrating.  In short, it was ripe for a remake.  While this version falls short in several departments, it honestly could’ve been a lot worse.

Members of the wealthy Haloran family congregate at their old lakeside gothic castle homestead.  Gloria (Julia Campanelli), the crazy matriarch, announces she’s giving their estate away to charity, which spins her conniving relatives off into devious directions.  They also contend with the possibility Gloria’s dead daughter’s ghost is haunting the premises.  To make matters worse, an axe murderer in a Japanese mask is also lurking about waiting to pick off the bickering family members.  

The movie keeps adding additional plot wrinkles into the mix (like a pack of thieves who come to the house looking to rob the place), all of which are half-baked and uneven at best.  Director Richard LeMay frantically tries to keep all the plates spinning at once and is only partially successful.  It’s almost as if the screenwriters knew there wasn’t much of a story to the original, so they toss in more and more subplots in an effort to spice things up.  Really, it would’ve worked better with a simpler, streamlined plot.

The big twist from the original happens right at the outset in this version, which in itself is a bit of a surprise.  (I can’t really justify giving you a spoiler warning since it occurs in the very first scene.)  From there on, the film becomes sort of a marriage of the original and You’re Next as the various unlikeable family members are singled out and killed by a mysterious masked figure.  To his credit, LeMay shows a knack for staging an axe murder, and the movie is slick looking and decently acted all around.  Just not enough to put it over the edge.  Dementia 13 isn’t exactly a bad movie, just an unnecessary and inessential one.