Dementamania, 2013.
Directed by Kit Ryan.
Starring Kal Penn, Vincent Regan, Geoff Bell, John Thomson, Holly Weston, and Robert van Twillert.
SYNOPSIS:
A frustrated office worker finds himself caught between the realms of his deranged imagination and the mundane reality of his everyday existence.
Given its strange title and slightly off-kilter premise (it was promised as The Office meets The Fly), you’d think that Dementamania would be a sure fire hit. Sadly, while not a dreadful movie, Dementamania does feel a little tired and flat.
The story centres around bored office worker Edward Arkham (Sam Robertson), who gets stung by a dying wasp after his morning exercise routine and then spends the rest of the day not quite feeling himself. He gets a bad case of road rage and then starts to fantasise about either killing his colleagues, or sleeping with them. As the wasp infection spreads, his mind starts to deteriorate as he is taunted by a stranger named Nicholas (Vincent Regan) to violent and drunken ends.
There have been many films over the years that have used the ‘fantasy kill into reality’ reveal and Dementamania does these very well. The only problem is that it goes to the well a few too many times to the point where it becomes annoying. Worse still, it never really leads to any payoff. The movie just moves along at a pedestrian pace, repeating what it did in the previous scene to varying degrees of success.
Robertson is great in the lead role and he does the best with what he is given as do his supporting cast. Harold and Kumar’s Kal Penn is a lot of fun as the company owner but it’s Robert van Twillert who shines as the cooky Pablo. He has this insane style of delivery that just makes every single line of his, bad or good, work.
Sadly however, for all the good male characters, Dementamania seems to really hate its female cast members. Perhaps Kit Ryan was trying to make a comment on the ‘male gaze’ (and there is a strong argument for that), but all of the women in the movie are either total bitches who screw him over or sexual objects for his perverted desires.
But Dementamania’s biggest problem is that there isn’t enough of an idea to satisfy its brief 90 minute running time. The constant fake outs of fantasies gets old quickly and all we’re then left with is some boring dialogue scenes to lead us to the double twist at the end (which most people will see coming a mile off). Dementamania often feels like it was a final year student project that got stretched out unnecessarily into a feature.
Some good performances cannot really save Dementamania or help make it a good one. It fell apart at script stage and it didn’t stand a chance at recovering. It seems incredible that this has taken 3 years to come fruition as that amount of time should have allowed for more creative thinking. A real shame as the idea of The Fly meets The Office had a lot of potential.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of Flickering Myth’s Podcast Network. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published August 24, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
