Waking Nightmare

This film does a decent job of pulling together a cast of horror main stays and newcomers in an uncomfortably funny and at times, disturbing opus. This film stands on it's own because it is claustrophobic, stylistically unique with scenes punctuated with disorienting psychedelic imagery, an interesting plot, and stellar performances all around. Diane Franklin, Jamison Newlander, David Naughton are in fine form, along with Shelly Regner who gives a compelling and believable performance as the lead. The cast, it seems understood the assignment and ran with it. If I could equate my viewing experience to another film, I am reminded of seeing American Psycho for the first time where I wasn't quite sure if I should laugh out loud, or be completely disturbed. Is it perfect? Not by any means. The film could have had the benefit of having elements further fleshed out, and perhaps a slightly longer run time. Overall, an interesting and captivating watch.

Suffering from debilitating sleepwalking issues, a woman trying to come to grips with it while staying at her parents' house becomes concerned when her behavior indicates the sleepwalking issues have brought her into a potential murder conspiracy and tries to find a way to stop it.

This was an overall decent genre effort. Among the better elements here is the solid setup here making for a great starting point to everything. Making a big deal about the recent series of events she has regarding her friends' death and using that as a catalyst for sleepwalking issues and nightmares that present her as a threat to herself and her family is a fine way to go about this. It's an intriguing series of storylines at play as the need to figure out the cause of these events once the ominous nature of it all gets brought up due to her constantly putting herself or others in danger through her sleepwalking antics. Once it's been established that she's not normal and that there's something going on, the film does manage to pick up somewhat towards the finale. Featuring some gruesome scenes where her sleepwalking antics bring about several chilling sequences of her coming across others and featuring not just brutal action, but some intriguing twists also emerge that keep this one going. These twists provide the kind of setup needed to launch into the kind of gruesome kills featured here which includes near torture-porn style presentation how it all comes about that's quite enjoyable. These all give the film quite a lot to like for its positives. There are some issues with this one that do hold it back. One of its main drawbacks is the avantgarde inserts designed to allegedly showcase her deranged emotional state but come off as weird for the sake of weird. From washed-out colors, acid filters, animated figures, and other bizarre imagery adorns this whenever she's in one of her episodes which is immensely unappealing, especially with the damaging soundtrack accompanying everything. The other factor with this one comes from the laid-back pacing where it takes way too long to spell out what's going on as the main faces on whether she's crazy or not so there's not much in the way of action here which keeps everything low-key until then. These are the problematic factors.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.