If David Lynch were transported back to the 1950’s and given a minuscule production budget, he would make a film much like John Parker’s Dementia. This independently produced “art noir” is like no other film in the universe: hyper-surrealist cinematography, total absence of dialogue, a constant soprano refrain sung by Marni Nixon (Audrey Hepburn’s dubbed singing voice in 1964’s My Fair Lady), a jazz band jamming in a room no bigger than a walk-in closet, a dwarf selling newspapers, childhood memories staged in a graveyard, less than an hour long, and the list of curiosities goes on and on. The story, if you can call it that, involves a woman who murdered her father as a girl and now can’t shake her instinct for murderous misandry: she’s assaulted by a drunk in an alley, rescued by a policeman, sold as a prostitute, and attacked by a mob for murdering her “client.”  Some or all of this story is presented as a nightmare from which she wakes up in a seedy hotel room with a neon sign blinking outside her window. A slightly altered version of the film, released as Daughter of Horror, features the threatening, stern voice-over of none other than “Tonight Show” sidekick Ed McMahon, who narrates in the second person point of view, making “you” the central character, possibly the first film — and certainly the only noir — ever to try this. Joseph Gluck’s editing works extremely hard to heighten the frenetic dread through rapid cross-cutting, particularly in the final fifteen minutes. It’s all a mesmerizing experience, a beautiful nighttime canvas where dream and doom collide, shocking for its 1950’s audacity.