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Nightmare (1981) - aka “Nightmare in a Damaged Brain”

Dir: Romano Scavolini

George Tatum (Baird Stafford) has just been released from a mental institution after undergoing experimental drug treatment to cure his psychotic episodes (he was a suspect in the sexual mutilation and murder of a Brooklyn family), which are triggered by his horrifying nightmares.

The experimental drug has supposedly mentally re-built George (despite at the same time a Doctor calling him dangerously homicidal!) and those behind the experiment want to use him for future Government work!?

Anyhow George is, not surprisingly, still nuts and still having nightmarish visions.
He’s also still a danger and shows this by going on a killing spree as his idiot Doctor’s try to track him down…

Released onto VHS in the UK under the marvellous title of “Nightmare in a Damaged Brain” this movie quickly became caught up in the infamous Video Nasties scare that hit Britain in the early 80’s.
But there is an extra layer of shit added to this shit-pile bit of history as far as “Nightmare” goes because it was the only film on the Nasties list that actually got a distributor sent to prison!

The mysterious, rather strange and all round rather sleazy, unfortunate who got sent down was Exploitation entrepreneur David Hamilton Grant, who ran the ‘World of Video 2000’ label.
Grant put out a print longer than the heavily cut BBFC ‘X’ cinema version on his video label (although even this print was not fully uncut) and had a classic old school gimmick to promote it…’Guess the weight of the brain in the jar’!
Sadly this is where the humour ends.
Found guilty of releasing ‘Obscene’ material he served 12 months in prison and his company was liquidated.

Grant, who was also at one time a British Sexploitation producer, would later end up in Cyprus where he was deported for assaulted a man with a spade and was also accused (never proven) of drug running and ‘corrupting children’. He was found dead under mysterious circumstances in 1991, perhaps the victim of a contract killing!

Why all that background dear reader?
Well, because quite frankly that story is sadly more interesting than the film itself.
No that there aren’t interesting nuggets of gore, sleaze and general weirdness to be found in the movie’s main chunk of tedium.

From the start we are certainly offered up something not quite the norm.
An amazingly disjointed opening, which is basically three separate sequences divided by George Tatum waking up and delivering an ear shredding scream, shows us that Scavolini’s film owes more to 70’s Grindhouse Exploitation Psycho flicks (and certainly the previous years throwback to those same movies, “Maniac”) than any typical 80’s Slasher fare.

Trash hounds will welcome the few shots of 80’s New York at this early point, as marquee cinemas hawk their filthy wares and sex joints beckon punters in with twinkling, dirt caked, light bulbs, and hopes are high for some prime grime to come. Such footage is always gold for Grindhouse groupies.

Hopes are raised even higher during a great peep show sequence where sweaty, bug-eyed, George pants away at a stripper before being given a private vibrator show (which in the ‘Code Red’ 2011 print is delightfully more explicit due to some astute re-framing) where he literally convulses on the floor in an orgasmic, mouth frothing, fit.
This is what we want! Insanity, sleaze, grime and a cloying atmosphere of social and mental decay.

The first 20 minutes features very little dialogue other than Psychiatrist narration, radio announcements or phone calls, which again adds to the strange, disjointed, where the hell is this going, feeling of the whole enterprise.
It's 30 minutes in until we get a grasp on any other characters other than George and his lame Doctors, at which point we fathom that Susan (Sharon Smith), a single Mother with 3 kids (one of them, C.J, seemingly disturbed) must have some importance to the plot.
Again, this almost surrealist approach to plot structure and progression adds a very strange feel to the movie. It basically becomes a damaged jigsaw puzzle with not only some pieces missing but pieces from other jigsaws thrown into it. As such the fascination at discovering just what picture you're going to end up with is very strong, but also very trying on the patience at the same time.

Thankfully George carries out his first kill about now and it’s a solid, old school, FX joy.
Tom Savini was on set to lend an advisory hand to FX artists Darryl Ferrucci and Ed French (although to this day controversy reigns about how much Savini was involved.
Scavolini says quite a lot, Savini says he did nothing but offer advice) and you can see that latex/dummy Savini influence in the FX work, even if it’s obviously done on very few resources and even less money.
The kill is a pretty effective throat slitting that is then coated with nasty sexual layers as George rams his knife into the woman’s belly with obvious sexual satisfaction. Again, this owes much to “Maniac”.

So far so damn good. But then it all goes horribly wrong.
After this first half hour of brain abusing madness and sleazy nastiness “Nightmare” starts to seriously tread water (at a bloated 98 minutes it's a good 10 minutes too long anyway) as we follow Susan’s shrieking dysfunctional family for what seems like forever and watch George randomly stand around in random places doing very little indeed.
After that first (non-flashback) kill we have to wait till over an hour into the film for the next one and then it happens off-screen!
Without the quick edit 'nightmare/flashback' scenes the movie would, despite its infamous reputation, be pretty uneventful as far as gore and violence goes for most of its running time.

Would be victims are randomly introduced, and may or may not be killed right away, as George randomly pops up to gaze at them. Then we have trick scares thrown into the mix, which keeps the audience very effectively on their toes at the time but also add to the brain aching frustration of nothing happening when they are indeed revealed as false/fake scares.
Just like the other weird aspects of the film as far as narrative goes this all adds up to a movie that does indeed become its own title...a nightmare. Something we can only hope was indeed intentional!

It's genuinely bizarre though how much the film slows down after the mad first third. The plot simply stops dead.
Even the gory flashbacks/visions vanish and we are left with people walking around aimlessly with nothing exciting (let alone gory or violent) happening for a good 40 minutes!
The half-hearted investigation by the Doctors seems like it was shoehorned into the main plot and is just another thing to needlessly pad out the running time and slow things down even more. They serve no purpose at all to anything that happens!
Plus the whole experimental drug/institution back-story is ridiculously obscure and confused anyway.

Acting is okay. C.J. Cooke who plays young C.J does a fine job, Sharon Smith is solid and Baird Stafford is effectively nutty in a suitably OTT way. It’s just that he’s given nothing to do after the first half hour except stand around, and even during the infamous finale he’s in a mask (a very good and creepy mask by the way) or his character is in flashback as a young boy.
As such the promising, sweaty nut-bag, type performance (very Joe “Maniac” Spinell like, only with less mad dialogue) we had initially from Stafford basically vanishes for the rest of the movie.

Thankfully...Praise the Gods thankfully…at the 80 (yes, 80) minute mark the film remembers it's about a psycho killer and we actually have some killing.
It remembers it once had gore in it too and the finale sure doesn’t let us down in this respect.
It's blood drenched, FX heavy, nasty wound glorifying, grimy greatness!
Again those classic 80’s practical FX deliver much spraying, pouring blood, gaping holes in flesh and flying heads.
Its exactly what you expect from a film dubbed ‘Nasty’.

So overall then when “Nightmare” is being a weird, sleazy, nasty, Slasher/Psycho flick and delivering solid grime and horror set-pieces it’s genuinely excellent.
Sadly it only spends about 45 minutes, out of its 98, actually being those things.
For the rest of the time it simply follows around characters that end up having little or nothing to do with how the film eventually plays out, has its killer literally stand around (or walk around) doing absolutely nothing and throws in the pointless 'Doctors on his trail' sub-plot for no reason at all.
It's basically an effective short film ridiculously padded out to feature length by non-FX/action-free footage that would cost as little as possible to produce.

A shame really. As with a leaner more eventful screenplay this could easily be one of the true, last hoorah, Grindhouse flicks (like the much mentioned “Maniac” it apes so much) as it has all the essential ingredients.
Sadly though such marvellous moments are lost in a tedious swampy, stodgy, disappointment of a movie overall.
Still worth a look for the gore/sleaze, as well as for its ‘Video Nasty’ history, though and the ‘Code Red’ DVD is a welcome release after so long putting up with VHS dupes.