Nightmare Cinema Has Ups And Downs But Ultimately Rules!
First, some advice before continuing: If you’re a fan of the Shock Waves podcast presented by Blumhouse, then I urge you to go back to episode 151 from earlier this summer and take a listen to that entry featuring Mick Garris and Alejandro Brugues as they talk about the creation and production of Nightmare Cinema before reading on. Not a requirement, but it might frame the review a little better if you know what went into the production. Also, not so much advice as a personal request: You should also check out Mick Garris’ weekly podcast, Post Mortem, presented by Fangoria. But enough of the plugs, let’s get on with the review!
Most of the #HorrorFam will no doubt recognize Mick Garris’ name from his work on such classic franchises as Critters, The Fly, Tales From the Crypt, and Amazing Stories, as both a writer and director. But most notable of his thirty plus years in the biz, and probably the franchise that gets him the most attention in the horror community, is the creation and cultivation of, premium cable channel Showtime’s, Masters of Horror. Not so much because it was on for some ridiculous amount of seasons (only two over the course of three years) or because it garnered a bevy of Emmy’s (only one and it was for music!), but because Garris had managed to single-handedly gather some of the most legendary names in the world of horror to write and direct episodes of a television show long before it was en vogue for big Hollywood names to make the jump to the small screen.
So when the word got around that Garris was at it again, but this time in cinematic form, a buzz was immediately kindled. And like Masters of Horror before it, Nightmare Cinema once again boasted some heavy hitters in the world of horror: Ryuhei Kitamura, a name I have mentioned more than once here on the site and known for his work on Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train, David Slade, whose 30 Days of Night redefined the vampire genre, Alejandro Brugués, my Cuban brother and guerilla filmmaker of Juan of the Dead, make-up effects by Greg Nicotero’s KNB EFX Group, writers such as Richard Matheson Jr., and legendary genre director Joe Dante and Garris himself, how the hell could you go wrong? Well, friends, I got good news and I got bad news.
First off, Nightmare Cinema is totally worth a watch for all the reasons (read: names) I’ve mentioned above, in addition to some really great performances. I enjoyed it, I really did, but it had its flaws in every department from post-production all the way up the line to acting. But there were some great roles too, most notable of which was 16-year-old Faly Rakotohavana (Fox’s The Mick) who steals the show as the lead in the final story, Dead. But, man, Richard Chamberlain makes an appearance, as does Adam Godley (The Umbrella Academy, Breaking Bad), so there’s plenty of award winning talent to go around. But Mickey Rourke’s role as The Projectionist, the “storyteller” of sorts featured in the wraparound film, falls flat. My guess, listening to Garris explain it in the aforementioned podcast, is they only had Rourke available for one shooting day, which I imagine would lend itself to some rushed or unprepared takes on location. But not only that, The Projetionist’s role in the whole thing is vague. In fact, other parts of the film suffer from some fragmented storytelling as well, but let’s start at the beginning.
The premise is simple: Five strangers all wander into a decrepit, rundown movie theater under different circumstances and at different times, with each having their name and unique movie title appearing on the marquee out front each time. Once inside, each stranger is shown a film that they happen to be the star in and in each film, they meet a horrible and gruesome end, but only in the movie, not in real life. But when we finally meet Rourke’s Projectionist (sporting a very sad attempt at a wig), and not even until after the second story has ended, he speaks in vagaries about being a curator of nightmares and a collector of death. It’s not until the end of the film that we find out 4 out of our five strangers are indeed dead. But why does the Projectionist let Riley, our last stranger, live and let him escape? What drew our strangers to the theater to begin with? And what did they do that was so bad in real life that the Projectionist had to take their lives after each film that he describes as being only a “possible future?” It’s all these questions and more that make the wraparound story the weakest of them all.
Luckily Garris redeems himself in the second of his two directorial offerings, Dead, which ends the film and stars the aforementioned Riley in a tale of the realm that exists between the living and the dead. In it, our hero Riley is the lone survivor and witness to a mugging that takes the life of both his mom (Annabeth Gish, ladies and gentleman) and dad. In the aftermath, Riley is shot and clinically dead for an entire seventeen minutes before doctors bring him back to the land of the living. However, it’s this duration of time spent in “purgatory” that grants Riley the ability to see both the living and the dead. So he thinks his mom is still alive at first when she keeps visiting him and urging him to “join” her and just go back to sleep. In the end, the mugger shows up to finish off the last witness in young Riley, when he finally realizes what it is to be given the gift of life and takes out the mugger before he can take out Riley. Of course, in the last moments of the story, Riley then sees the dead mugger roaming the halls of the hospital.
Dead is definitely the stand out of the five stories, but there are plenty of other great things happening in the others. I was most excited to watch Alejandro Brugués offering because of his work in Juan of the Dead but also because he’s still such a young talent. He doesn’t disappoint in the first story, The Thing in the Woods, a story that he describes as the last twenty minutes of an 80’s slasher. There’s some great gore in this one and we’re also introduced to horror icon in the making, The Welder. There’s also a great twist ending in which we find out that The Welder wasn’t a bad dude after all and was just taking out his camping buddies because they were infected with an alien spider that took control of their bodies. In the end, the welder gets infected himself and brings the alien scourge into the big city. Good stuff.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Dante’s Mirari, because it just reminded me too much of the legendary 1960’s The Twilight Zone episode Eye of the Beholder and Serling’s original anthology series just holds too special a place in my heart. Kitamura and Slade’s offerings both had their positives, coming mainly in the form of visuals, with the latter presented wholly in black and white. There’s some great editing in Kitamura’s Mashit, as well as makeup effects, and of course, gore. But both suffer in the realm of story in that they both feel like they were parts of bigger movies and just cut down to fit into the anthology forum. With Mashit, we’re never really told why the namesake demon killed this one boy to begin with, which kind of sets in motion the actions for the rest of the short. But there are some really evil kids in this one and Kitamura, unlike most other filmmakers, does not shy away from presenting each of them with their own gruesome fatality, never veering the lens away from the gore that follows. I can respect that.
In Slade’s This Way to Egress, aside from the use of a black and white canvas, there are a slew of other cool visuals going on. In it, our heroine is slowly creeping into madness by way of something only alluded to in the story as “the descent,” so Slade uses some clever makeup design and visual effects to show this world she exists in becoming more and more bizarre. It kind of reminded me of Silent Hill, the original videogame, and how the main character in that would quickly shift from the normal world, which was already creepy, into this grotesque opposite of the world he knew. But again, back in Slade’s world, the allusion to this thing called the descent and the mention of alternate realities just left me wondering more about the world that our story was taking place in.
I only paid a paltry 99 cents for a rental on the Prime and at that price you really can’t go wrong venturing into the Nightmare Cinema on your own. It is now officially streaming on Shudder so you can watch for free! But be warned, although Brugués has stated that his entry was an idea for a larger film that he condensed to fit into the anthology format, some of the other submissions may leave you wondering the same thing due to their implication of a much larger world beyond the scope of just their limited lens. But the gratuitous gore, sleek visuals, and big name talent should be enough to keep you rolling all the way through to the end. In the end, for it’s fragmented storytelling, minor post-production missteps (in one scene, an actor can be seen holding the switch for a squib that explodes on their chest just moments later), and one really bad wig (still love ya, Mickey), I’m left giving Garris and company’s Nightmare Cinema three corpse fingers out of five.
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