October Edition #9: NIGHTMARE (aka NIGHTMARE IN A DAMAGED BRAIN)

Director: Romano Scavolini
Screenplay: Romano Scavolini      
Starring: Baird Stafford, Sharon Smith, C.J. Cooke, Mik Cribben
Release Date: 1981


Romano Scavolini’s NIGHTMARE is a vile, depraved, skuzzy little shocker that ranks among the best of its kind to play the grind houses of New York’s 42nd Street. Unlike its other exploitative brethren, however, it takes the time to set up a group of realistic characters who are allowed to breathe and earn the audiences sympathy, rather than exist as mere cardboard cut-outs meant whose sole purpose is to die, naked and violently. I was pleasantly surprised by just how efficient and well-made this sadistic little bastard was.

George Tatum shows off his wicked awesome Ray Charles impersonation.

George Tatum (Stafford) has got some issues: schizophrenia, seizures, mild amnesia, and your typical homicidal tendencies. He is haunted by waking nightmares of a vicious axe-murder that he witnessed as a child, and that may or may not have been perpetrated by himself. Reprogramming him using experimental behavioral control meds developed by the military, his idiotic doctors grant him a premature release from the New York mental institution he’s been staying in, and after a quick stopover at a sleazy sex show on 42nd Street he immediately snaps and goes off the grid, embarking on a cross-country trip to Florida to terrorize an unsuspecting family who happens to live in his childhood home. Unable to repress his urges, he commits several gruesome murders along the way, in a desperate bid to recreate the conditions of his original crime.

I thought I'd include this shot for the ladies.

I don’t know how much was intentional on the part of the filmmakers, but this movie reminds me a lot of MANIAC, in that it is anchored by a powerful lead performance of hypnotic intensity and brings a healthy dose of pathos to its storytelling. George Tatum commits some heinous acts, including the off-screen murder of a young boy, but he derives absolutely no pleasure from what he does, is in fact just as sickened as we are. He is a man who absolutely knows the difference between right and wrong and for reasons he can’t control, be it some chemical imbalance or a split personality, is in a constant state of severe mental anguish. There is a scene late in the movie where he drives out to a deserted beach to dispose of one of his victims’ bodies and suffers a total breakdown, weeping and screaming up at the sky, that actually sort of moved me. With the exception of MANIAC, it’s rare that you see this kind of care taken with the characters in a slasher movie from this era.



Probably the weakest aspect of the flick is the story that takes place concurrently with George’s involving the family in Florida. From the very first scene Scavolini cuts back and forth from George in New York, to this family who seems to have no connection to the main plot. Susan Temper (Smith) is the single mother of three children, one of whom, C.J. (Cooke), is obsessed with telling tall tales and pulling cruel practical jokes on his family, like covering himself in ketchup and pretending he’s bleeding to death from a stab wound. It is made quite clear that C.J. suffers from some daddy issues, and at certain points his story is juxtaposed with images of a blood-covered child George. It’s fairly obvious that the filmmakers are attempting to draw parallels between C.J.’s behavior and George’s, but until the very end it isn’t clear why, which can prove frustrating. More frustrating, however, is the acting in these portions of the film. Susan is shrill, always on the verge of a total meltdown, yelling at her children to shut up and taking out her anger at C.J. on the other two out of sheer pettiness. Her acting isn’t entirely awful, per se, it’s just a bit too much. Scene after scene plays out with her just freaking out over little things, and while her relationship with here children struck me as scarily realistic (hey, parents are bitches) it wasn’t something I can say I enjoyed sitting through. Also, C.J. Cooke is such a failure of an actor that they had to give his character his real name. I don’t give a fuck if he was a kid. Don’t be in fucking movies if you can’t pretend to be someone else, fuckwad! That goes for you too, Jake Lloyd!



But again, while the scenes with the family were a bit annoying, they lend a much-needed sense of realism to the proceedings so that by the film’s climax, which features George infiltrating the house wearing one of C.J.’s Halloween masks and butchering the babysitter and her boyfriend, I actually cared about the members of the Temper family, even if I didn’t exactly like them. These are real people, and there are real psychological consequences to what goes down in the flick’s final third, for George, C.J., and Susan. I like when a horror movie makes you contemplate the effects these events will have on the survivors long after the movie is over.





But enough of that serious shit. What about the gore? On the whole, it is a bit sparse, but when Scavolini finally does decide to deliver on the grue, holy fuck does he ever! There’s a fairly nasty slit throat, and the Temper’s babysitter gets taken out with an ice pick that leaves a few dozen extra hole where there weren’t previously holes before. But the absolute highlight of the flick, the piece de resistance, is the axe-murder from George’s childhood. George is terrorized by visions of the severed head of a woman whom he caught in the middle of a sadomasochistic sex act with his father. Glimpses of this scene are peppered throughout the movie, but we are never allowed to see much until the film’s final five minutes, where we finally get to see what traumatized young George so badly in all of it’s ridiculously over-the-top glory. It is fucking amazing, and rumor has it that Tom Savini himself acted as a consultant with the special effects guys on this scene to help them make it as gloriously gory and vindictive as humanly possible. Savini claims he had nothing to do with the movie, and even sued the producers for putting his name in the credits and the trailers. Whatever the case may be, it is a truly epic and stomach-churning piece of film.

This movie will shoot you in the face with its awesomeness.

I don’t know what else I can say other than this movie is far better than it should be. It suffers from the usual poor performances and, due to the original negative being lost, the picture quality on this DVD from Code Red suffers from an abundance of scratches and debris on the film print. I kinda like that, though, as it adds to the grimy atmosphere created by Scavolini and company, almost as though I’m right there in a smelly theater on 42nd Street in the heyday of exploitation film-making. NIGHTMARE takes a derivative premise and does something most slasher movies fail to do, which is give a damn about the characters, all while delivering the gory goods.

My Rating:
7.5/10