Dementia 13

Francis Ford Coppola's directorial debut, produced by horror king Roger Corman, is a terror-filled tale of family ties chopped to pieces. DEMENTIA 13's opening scene of Louise and John Haloran alone on a boat drifting nowhere (as an Elvis Presley song plays hauntingly) is reminiscent of many Hitchcock films. Its 1963 release was just the beginning of what, for Coppola, would be a long career of helming chillingly powerful masterworks such as APOCALYPSE NOW and THE GODFATHER.

Set in a spooky Irish castle, DEMENTIA 13 begins as the Haloran family gathers to memorialize the death of the youngest sister, Kathleen. While various family members plot and connive, an ax murderer is terrorizing the grounds, and Kathleen's body shows up at just the wrong time. Slowly, the family members become increasingly suspicious of each other--as well as of the ghosts that haunt the castle. But when the sinister family doctor is called in to help with the mystery, the expertly planned Coppola chills really take hold.

Invitation to Hell

British filmmaker Michael J. Murphy has been making ultra-independent genre films since the late 1970s. INVITATION TO HELL was one of his first efforts, made a cult classic from infamy gained during the "video nasties" censorship craze of the early 1980s. A young woman is tricked into visiting an abandoned country house, where she is captured along with a group of bizarre and frightening characters. It soon becomes apparent that some of the house's occupants are satanists, and that they plan to offer the woman as a virgin vessel for a demon's child. Is there any way for her to escape this strange and horrible fate? INVITATION TO HELL should be of great interest to connoisseurs of low budget and British horror.