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.
