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Dementia 13

(1963)

This one starts with a guy taking a rowboat ride with his bitchy (but super hot) wife. He tells her that his mother cut them out of the will, which they both know already but they have to explain this shit to us somehow and if they actually filmed it the movie would be ten minutes longer. Normally that would be okay, but Roger Corman made this and he hates to spend more than 50 or 60 bucks on a movie, tops. So... the guy ends up having a heart attack and dies, but he's so into telling the backstory and shit that he keeps right on talking as he gags to death on the floor of the boat. When he finally shuts up, the wife throws his body in the pond and then tells everybody he went on a business trip. The dead dude's mom and brothers totally swallow the business trip story, but the wife freaks out anyway when one of them tells her about their dead sister, who drowned in the very same pond! Holy shit! Wait a minute, what difference does that make? Is she afraid that her dead husband is gonna recruit the dead sister so they can team up against her or something? It's not like she killed the guy- all she did was hide his body. That's pretty much a victimless crime, like shoplifting or date rape. It's not the kind of thing zombies come back from the dead and strangle you over. Get a grip on yourself, baby.

So, the next day the one brother's fiancé shows up. The mom hates her, I'm assuming because her name is "Kane" and with a  name like that your only real choices are to marry for money or change your first name to "Kandy" and become a stripper. So now a bunch of petty soap-opera bullshit goes on, with everyone walking around the family castle making snide comments and whining. It reminded me of the really old episodes of Dark Shadows, when it was still in black & white and before they introduced the vampire dude. Things finally pick up when the wife comes up with this plan to make the mom think the dead girl's ghost is in the pond, but before she can get things rolling somebody shows up and hacks her to death with an axe while she's in her underwear.* This freeloading doctor who always seems to be hanging around is determined to solve the mystery, so he makes the help drain the pond, even though there's no reason they should be taking any orders from him. They find a gravestone for the dead sister under the pond and everybody freaks out, but the dead husband's body is nowhere to be seen. I guess the movie just completely forgot about him.

Anyway, the doctor tries to find some clues by being a cock to everyone, but for some reason that plan doesn't work. Later, when the stripper and the one brother get married, he tries his "being a cock" gambit again, and the bride gets so upset that she has to go roll around in the grass with her new husband. After the doctor gets tired of spying on them (fucking pervert), he has a smoke and suddenly figures out who the murderer is. He finds the murderer's "secret" lair** where he keeps all the bodies of the people he iced, plus a wax dummy of the dead sister. The doctor figures that the killer will flip out if he messes with the dummy, so he puts it in the front yard and sure enough, the killer freaks and tries to waste the bride when she goes to touch it.***  The doctor caps the fucker, then he acts all cool and shit, like he's the bomb for figuring it all out and like it isn't total bullshit that he almost got that Kane chick killed on her wedding day just to prove his point. Fuck this guy.

*Needless to say, this is the best part of the movie. Bitch truly was smokin'.

**It's just some old building on the property. It isn't even locked.

***It wasn't exactly hard to figure out who the killer was, by the way, since we sort-of saw him kill the hot wife and only one person in the entire movie has his height & build.