This post is a week late and for that I apologize. I know everyone was on the edge of their seat wondering when I would poorly type out half baked thoughts on a film you may or may not have heard of while I post weird .gifs and images from said films. Much like the difficulties I had when I was trying to write about Spacehunter, I had the majority of this post already written when I made the fatal error of attempting to save it as a draft on Blogger. Evidently there is a known issue that drafts don't save correctly with this platform and I am not the first person to lose all of their work. It sucks. I had some amazing jokes and commentary that has been lost to the ages. No, don't go looking for it, it was too good and I set the bar way to high. It's for the best.
The film I chose to watch for the blog for October is one that was chasing the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. But, Paul, why did you decide to look at a Nightmare knockoff and not another Child's Play pretender? Well, Dolly Dearest and its made for TV blandness turned me off to the cursed doll subgenre of horror for a bit.
So before I accidently lose this post's contents, let's have some Bad Dreams.
The trailer doesn't shy away from the goop.
Here is the wikipedia page, and the imdb.com listing.
First, a small warning. Bad Dreams isn't the greatest film, but it does have some surprisingly effective gore in it. If you are bothered by such imagery, then maybe you should steer clear of this discussion as I will be sharing some gnarly .gifs. We good? Good.
Bad Dreams starts off in the mid 1970's at a farm/compound called Unity Fields. It is lead by the charismatic and very creepy Franklin Harris (Richard Lynch, more on him later). He is talking about the 'ultimate joining' of man and woman in unity while he is bringing his followers up one by one to be baptized by a ladle of liquid. He tells them its the final break with the old world and with the dawn, a new day begins, a day of unity.
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| He sees hippies. Hippies for miles. |
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| RIP hippies. The fire probably stank of Patchouli and Grateful Dead album covers. |
When Cynthia wakes up, she finds herself in the care of Dr. Berrisford (Harris Yulin). Cynthia can not remember the specific events of the night when Unity Fields burned and Dr. Berrisford believes group therapy can help her recover her lost memories. The group therapy though, is composed of people who are suffering from borderline personality disorder and it is not quite apparent why Cynthia would be placed with people who's biggest challenges are with anger, delusion, and self harm. The leader of the group, Dr. Alex Karmen (Bruce Abbott) doesn't understand why Berrisford placed her there as well but goes along with the placement because Berrisford is his superior.
Bruce Abbot's name may sound somewhat familiar. He was Dr. Dan Cain in the Re-Animator films. He was the straight man to Jeffery Combs's Dr. Herbert West. Can someone get type cast as a well meaning doctor that has shit go crazytown no matter how hard he tries to not let that happen?
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| 'My diagnosis? Yes.' |
Cynthia seems moderately well adjusted considering her cult past and 13 years gone. She is trying to figure out her next steps in life as she has no friends or family or anything waiting for her outside the hospital. There's only one problem though; she keeps seeing Franklin Harris showing and up asking her to join him on the other side, to be unified with him and the rest of his followers. One particular creepy moment involves Cynthia in an elevator full of people when he appears.
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| 'Third floor: kitchen wares, comas, and burned up hotdog men.' |
No one believes Cynthia that she is seeing him, they do believe that she is processing what happened to her years ago. After doing some 'scream therapy' (where all the group members screamed into pillows), Cynthia's memories of that last night flood back. She recalls that the liquid that Harris was baptizing members with was just straight gasoline. He pours a large tub of it over his head and lights a match, causing the house and the people inside to quickly get covered in flames. Some people react more slowly than others.
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| This is how I finally was able to get out of my Columbia House cassette club membership.
As soon as her memory is filled in, Harris starts appearing more and more, trying to get Cynthia to kill herself and cross over to him. If she refuses to do so, he threatens that he will start taking those that are around her. She doesn't want to believe him but soon people do start to die around her in odd ways.
Cynthia has a vision of seeing Harris baptizing her (in a creek, not with gasoline). As she is watching herself being forced underwater by him, Cynthia sees that it is no longer her in his hands, but a girl from her therapy group. When she snaps out of her vision, she hears commotion coming from the nearby hospital swimming pool. The girl from her group and her vision has forcibly drowned herself.
Later on, a group member that was once a reporter for a scandal magazine tries to convince Cynthia that they could both leave the hospital and sell her Unity Fields story and start her life over. The former reporter is getting on an elevator to go and get their belongings when Cynthia sees Harris waiting for her friend. The doors close and Cynthia races down the stairwell in hopes of stopping Harris.
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With two very gruesome suicides in less than two days, the press come to ask an obvious question: Is it a coincidence that the girl from the suicide cult wakes up 13 years later and those around her are starting to kill themselves? Dr. Berrisford dismisses this and simply states to the reporters that people with borderline personality disorder have a predisposition to committing suicide. He believes the therapy he is overseeing that Dr. Alex Karmen is conducting is the correct way to treat these people.
And as soon as he makes this statement, we find that two other group members, a not-so-secret couple, have snuck off after lights out to go have sex in a ventilation room with a large ominus spinning fan behind them. Cynthia, drawn out into the hallway due to some sounds she is hearing from the vents, looks up and see Harris in the vent beckoning her to join him. You would expect that because the couple that were having sexy times by the spinny fan would be the next victims and their blood would come out of the vents above Cynthia. You would be right. How it happens though, is not something I would expect many people to guess.
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| Worst. Sprinker. Ever. |
There's is way more blood there than two horny people could produce. This doesn't even show that just before this happened a janitor gets a Double Dare sized portion of human slop dropped on him (including at least one hand). You have to believe that a hospital has some kind of protocol on how to deal with such a large biohazard. This will take days to address...
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| ...or one guy with a mop in the very next scene. Give that man a raise. |
As the numbers of the group dwindle, Crystal believes that Harris is actually killing them off till she finally joins him. Dr. Karmen decides to stay the night with Crystal in her room, to show her that there won't be any more deaths.
Meanwhile, the last few members of the group have cops posted outside their room doors. Ralph (Dean Cameron), one of the more violent and aggressive group members, is alone in his room with a very large knife. Earlier in the film, Ralph confided in Cynthia that when things get to be too much, he makes a hole in himself to let it all out and he feels better. He shows her his abdomen that is filled with pinhole scars. Ralph with a knife is bad business. What he does with it though...
Turn away while you still can...
You have been warned....
You have only yourself to blame...
| JESUS CHRIST. |
I don't often swear out loud when watching a film by myself, but that hand jammed onto the knife made me say say stuff that I am not going to type here. Needless to say Ralph is not in a good state of mind after he does this. This sequence eventually leads to Ralph stabbing himself to death with scalpels in front of Cynthia and Dr. Karmen.
Dr. Berrisford wants to now put Cynthia in isolation and Dr. Karmen disagrees and threatens to get a court order and Berrisford fires Karmen. Somewhere along the way, Karmen has one of the anti-depressants that was given the group members and decides to pop it on the way out the door, you know, as medically licensed professional doctor are oft to do. This leads to him having this vivid hallucination in the parking lot of him killing Berrisford. Dr. Karmen has a hunch and goes down to where the prescriptions are kept for all the patients in the hospital and checks his group members's records. The pharmacist there has a familiar face. Or at least a familiar voice.
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| You might better know him as Roger Rabbit. |
Dr. Karmen discovers, with the help of the pharmacist, that Berrisford secretly switched the therapy drugs to ones that are hallucinogenic and spike aggressive behavior. Berrisford was purposefully making his potentially suicidal patients tip over the edge and actually kill themselves to prove some theory about behavior he was researching. Franklin Harris wasn't really there. Berrisford was the real monster.
Karmen confronts Berrisford as he is trying to get Cynthia to choose to jump off the roof of the hospital. Cynthia, drugged out of her mind, believes if she jumps, she will join Harris and the rest of Unity. Karmen saves the day and Berrisford ends up falling off the building.
The film ends very quickly and then the credits play. With this song.
I was completely confused as to why Sweet Child O' Mine would be at the end of this film. Evidently, Bad Dreams was coming out right before Guns N' Roses blew up and became the biggest rock band in the world. Per the trivia for the film, the video for the song was supposed to be a tie in to Bad Dreams and was to show clips from the film. Axle Rose's girlfriend nixed the idea as she didn't want the song, which was about her, to be related to a film full of mentally unstable people killing themselves. Probably a good call.
So a couple of comments about some of the cast and people behind Bad Dreams. First, this film was produced by Gale Ann Hurd. She's got a writing and producing credit on The Terminator, producing credit on Aliens (which came out two years prior to Bad Dreams) and is an executive producer on The Walking Dead. She knows how films and productions should work and is responsible for a lot of great stuff. I don't know why this was her very next project after Aliens. She feels too good for something like this.
Second, this was written by Stephen E. de Souza (with the director Andrew Flemming). He is responsible for writing the scripts for 48 Hrs., Commando, The Running Man, Die Hard, Hudson Hawk, Judge Dredd (the Stallone One), and Street Fighter. He has more misses than hits, but he has memorable films. I don't really have more to add about him other than I was surprised that this was one of his films considering that he is mainly known for action and comedy.
Third, Richard Lynch, who played Franklin Harris, was really good in this film. He had the right balance of magnetism and creepiness that made him always compelling to watch when he was on the screen. When I learned that in 1967, while under the influence of drugs that he had set himself on fire and burned 70% of his body, I lost my mind. I can't image what that would be like to go through and then one day take a role in which you play a character the purposefully douses themselves in gasoline and then lights themself on fire. I know he didn't actually do this during filming, but there has to be a long hard look in the mirror before you shoot that scene right? God damn, he elevates the quality of the film every time he shows up and knowing that he is playing a man who burned to death in light of the events of his actual life, it just makes his performance stronger.
I can see how Bad Dreams is trying to walk in the shadow of Dream Warriors. You have a burned up boogeyman reaching out from beyond the grave to a group of psychologically and emotionally challenged people who are on the verge of commiting suicide with very little push needed. Hell, the lead, Jennifer Rubin, was in Dream Warriors as Taryn, the punk rock girl with 7 foot tall mohawk.
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| She's bad and beautiful. Just not in this film. |
Also, the name of the film, Bad Dreams, is supposed to make you think that this film is trying to be Elm Street. There is one big problem with this though: CYNTHIA NEVER DREAMS IN THE FILM. No one dreams and then ends up dead. All the deaths happen while everyone is awake. There isn't even an attempt to do a headnod or eye flutter to imply that someone just accidently fell asleep and now they are in the boiler room Unity Fields. Maybe it is supposed to set you up for the fake out that the real cause of the problem was drugs, not dreams. In that case it works... kind of.
I think there is an interesting idea in Bad Dreams, I just don't know if it was handled well. The notion that someone who was a part of a cult in which all the members voluntarily let themselves die and they did not, and how would that affect their world view and their sense of purpose along with their self worth is an very compelling idea. Having their guilt manifest itself as a burned corpse of their leader/father figure adds layers to that. Then mix in that this all could be supernatural or their guilt or the drugs they are being forced to take and you have a film I want to watch. Bad Dreams somehow tries to do this but falls on its keys in a way that is hard to put my finger on. I think its biggest sin is that none of the characters are really relatable (most of the group members are obnoxious) and you don't really ever feel sympathy for any of them. If I don't care about anyone in the film, then I won't care when their blood coats an entire floor of a hospital.
Bad Dreams isn't a bad film, and it is worth watching for Richard Lynch and the gut twistingly great gore effects. I am glad I checked it out even if that hand stab is going to haunt my dreams (the ones I will have actually have, unlike the none that happened in the film) for quite a while.
On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?
I am going to go with a 7. It had the following:
- A burned up hotdog man tormenting people from the afterlife (kind of).
- Jennifer Rubin who was in Dream Warriors.
- Charles Fleischer who was in the original Nightmare on Elm Street.
- A death involving falling from a great height.
- A group of psychologically challenged patients being picked off one by one.
- A well meaning doctor trying to help his patients but ultimately can't.
- A rock song playing over the end credits (GNR is pretty good, but they are no Dokken).
If Bad Dreams had ended up being purely supernatural, it would have bumped the score up higher, but there is still a lot these films have in common.
On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator?
Ator has less hand stabs and a way more awesome end credits song, but Bad Dreams is a better made film.
Would you recommend this film to anyone else?
Yes, this is an interesting film to seek out if you have seen all the Elm Street films and are looking for a little different take on the same formula. Just don't eat while watching it.
