The Demented – 2021 – Sex Trafficking

First of all, The Demented isn’t a film for everyone. If you are offended by sexual themes including sexual violence and torture maybe you should stop reading now.

The Demented is made as a comment on the thousands of people going missing each day in the world. There are some figures at the beginning of the film about how many missing people are found alive. How many are found dead and how many that aren’t ever found at all? I have no idea if the figures are accurate but I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t remember the exact numbers right now. But they are like 3 percent being found alive, eight percent being found dead and the rest… well, never found at all.

Interesting premise

I think this is an interesting premise. I was looking forward to some gruesome violence as The Demented is obviously an exploitation flick. There are numerous scenes where some of the women bare their breasts, but that’s it. There is no actual violence on camera. Well, that’s kind of truthful anyway. Of course, there is violence on camera, just not the sadistic violence you might think. If that’s because they couldn’t do the special effect well enough or because they didn’t know how. I don’t know. Maybe writer/director Nigel Hartwell wanted it that way?

The acting is horrible. I could have lived with that if there was something else saving the movie. But unfortunately, the plot is boring and despite the intro explaining that the film was made as a social comment, there’s not much commenting being made. At least not that is comprehensive for me. There are some scenes and ideas that would have been interesting to see explored though. As when one of the victims is talking directly to the camera. This could have been made very clever and interesting. But it’s not.

Messy

Underneath it all is a criminal investigation about a woman being found dead (I think) and the flashbacks to the other victims. There are also the “other” story, about this victim being stuck between life and death with the sole purpose of helping further victims of the sadistic perpetrator. Does it seem messy? That’s because it is! I don’t get it.

I agree with the saying that less is more most of the time but not in this case. It would have been better if the violence were over the top. I think that The Demented could have been a cool cult film if it were to contain some nasty and well-made special effects torture scenes. But the only blood I remember was CGI and very poorly made. In this case, more would be more and might have made this a film spoken in the same sentence as The August Underground movies. But I think that The Demented will be forgotten very soon. Furthermore, I want my 90 minutes back…