Video Nasty #9: Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

Synopsis: After leaving a mental asylum George is making the long journey to Florida to see his estranged child. As he starts racking up a body count the doctors realise they may of made a slight mistake. Can they get to George's family before he does?

In 2010 i'm attempting to watch and review all of the films on the DPP Video Nasty list. Click here for an explanation.

Nightmares is something of a cult classic, gaining particular infamy as one of the film's repeatedly vilified by the media during the Video Nasty furore. This is not without reason; there is some extremely bloody violence in the film (after all, horror effects legend Tom Savini did act as an advisor). I'll admit that the film did make me very uncomfortable, but not in an emotional sense, more an impulse-buy Ikea dining room chair uncomfortable. The film is so dull I actually felt physically ill, fidgeting in my seat, desperate to make it to the end as not to cop-out on my self-inflicted curse of watching this crap.

I don't understand how acting can be so dreadful. Acting can't be that hard, can it? Maybe the producers had a challenge to see if they could cast an entire film using people with less acting chops then a mountain goat. If that was the idea the film was, in its own way, the film is a triumph.

The most annoying aspect of the film is its attempt at broken-family drama, which unfortunately dominates the film. The wife is torn between her boyfriend and children, the kids are running amok and the youngest is developing his father's less desirable character traits. I guess the viewer is meant to care for the family, contributing to the slow crescendo of tension as the demented father gets ever closer. Unfortunately the combination of poor acting and appalling dialog meant that I ended up hating the family, wishing the dad would just give up on the slow burn, jump on a plane and dispatch these morons.

Thankfully there were a few moments of unintentional light relief. My favourite occurs after the son's friend has been murdered. A police officer suspects the kid of foul play, so he takes the corpse out the back of the ambulance, puts it on display and in front of news crew's cameras grills the poor kid. This scene would be the undoing of any other film, but in Nightmares it was a highlight. What a disappointment.