Dreamaniac

Usually, I'm a big fan of David DeCoteau's cheesy brand of low budget horror. Most of his film appear to have been shot in a weekend (this is literally the case many times) with a typically mediocre cast of actors trying their best to bring a not-quite-there script to life. Dreamaniac features all of these things, but it's missing the trademark DeCoteau energy that makes his films so much fun. No one really feels like they want to be here and everything feels like it's going through the motions.

The plot (or what I could decipher of it) involves a college guy who has dreams of a creepy succubus. On the night of a party at his place, this dream girl appears out of the blue and no one has any idea who she is. Soon, she's murdering everyone in the house. There's also something about hash brownies that make some of the partygoers crazy.

Dreamaniac is a movie where things just happen for no reason whatsoever. There's no narrative flow at all and we never know a thing about most of the characters. Without the fast and furious pacing that most of these types of movies has, its flaws become much more prominent.

If you're into attractive men showing off their nude bubble butts, you're in luck. And how great is that artwork? How can any film live up to something that wonderful?

Dreamaniac was only my second viewing from the oeuvre of gay horror notable David DeCoteau, unless there are others that I've forgotten about. The first by the way was Puppetmaster 3: Toulon's Revenge, which is pretty great fun in the way that only a film with living puppets against Nazi's can be. This one though, sadly not so good. The film centres on a party gatecrashed by a kill happy succubus, but while there is a fair measure of potential interest in such a scenario the film opts for pretty much a generic slasher approach, livened in the final block by the introduction of zombies into the mix. Things kick off with mixed signals, a tilted camera watches a naked man walk down a pink lit hallway into a shower where he meets a bloody naked lass who sets about some brief clawing. Its intriguing enough, and the brief shot of bloody boobs is a definite plus, but on the other hand it does set up the films cheese, rampant 80's-ness and interest in male flesh. The film gets quickly into the party which occupies the rest of the runtime and here starts to sink into a disinterested fug of not all that much worth. We get plenty of horny youngsters, liberal doses of bitchy lines, unsatisfying sex and occasional killing, the killing steadily ramping up in regularity as things go on. The sex is unsatisfactory on two fronts, for one it's often interrupted either by other party goers or death, and for seconds we see a good deal of bare male chests, guys in just their pants and so on but no tits and ass or even male genitals. Wangs on display aren't even my kettle of piranhas but they might have given the scenes a bit more of an impact. Probably the most notable example of visual man love is an electrocution in which the camera gazes up at a guys tight Y-fronts as he expires, not really my kettle of fish like I said but it did make me chuckle. As far as the slaughter goes, there's more light blood spray than there is gore, though there are maybe two or three nice cheap gore shots in the last half hour including inspired use of a drill. This isn't the sort of film where any viewers are likely to be bothered about acting, characterisation and whatnot, but probably worth mentioning that Sylvia Summers (who?) does a nice enough job as the murderous demon, very much an 80's looking gal with trashy appeal and a suitably compelling lowbrow presence. Also, the female lead is played by Ashlyn Gere (credited as Kim McKamy), who went on to a successful porno career and also starred in another junky late 80's horror, the backwoods cannibal joint Lunch Meat. As well as being a fine looking lass she also contributes probably the best performance of the cast and it seems almost a shame that she departed the realms of genre cinema, but then I've never seen any of her adult work so it may well be inspiring stuff. Finally, the end of this one is pretty much nonsensical, somewhere between a giggle and a face-palm, people who dig idiotic endings will likely get a smile or two out of it. Altogether, this ain't really worth watching unless you absolutely have to see every crappy 80's horror out there or you really dig DeCoteau films. Still, its far from the worst out there, definitely better than a poke in the eye with a wet stick. See it if you must, but leagues away from essential.

"Dreamaniac" is apparently the first non-pornographic movie David DeCoteau made. Unfortunately he had certainly not found his feet as a director of mainstream films when he made it. The movie is stylistically indistinguishable from porn: filmed claustrophobically in only one location, poorly shot apparently on video with badly lit scenes, and even the dialogue is badly recorded like in a porn flick, either mumbled and hard to make out because it was recorded on scene, or much too loud and ear-jarring because it was obviously re-done in post-production.

We only know it's not a porno because it doesn't feature actual sex. It seems like DeCoteau decided to use the location and crew from one of his porno flicks to try and see if he could make a feature film. It's as though after the cast/crew from his previous "New Wave Hustlers" or "Boys Just Want to Have Sex" had gone home, DeCoteau called up some friends in the night and asked them to come over to make his dream of mainstream film direction a reality.

This is not to say that the movie doesn't have any sex. It has so many sex scenes it could almost be softcore porn, except for the fact that there's no attempt at eroticism, and no female nudity. That's right: it's a low-budget slasher without boobs. All the nudity is male: bare butts, and of course DeCoteau using the opportunity to indulge his tighty-whitie fetish. You can barely see any nudity anyway, because the movie looks like it was filmed through mud and shot exclusively at night with barely any lighting. In one scene, characters were supposed to be having sex, but then I realised the actress was still fully clothed.

The plot is allegedly about a heavy metal musician who summons a succubus with some candles and spooky words and she helps him get girls so she can kill them. This plot sounds like b-movie gold, but the movie doesn't bring it to life. The guy seems to have a girlfriend, so apparently he doesn't even need any supernatural assistance in getting female attention. Obviously they should have made him a clueless yet charming dork, desperate for love, so that we could understand his motivations and maybe root for him, and also understand the movie itself. Instead the whole thing is really distancing.

When the succubus or whatever she's supposed to be starts killing people, it's typical low-budget, shot-on-video slasher movie fare, with extreme close ups of the victim's faces with blood sprays to hide the lack of any real gore effects. But get this: half way through the movie we see someone getting stabbed in the eye in a close-up. Did they spend all of the movie's $500-or-so budget on that one shot?

Nah. There's actually a couple more gore shots toward the end, with a drill bit going through a guy's hand, and a late-term decapitation. Then there's some attempt at a twist ending that no one ever would have seen because no one possibly could have been paying attention by that time. I know I wasn't. This movie taxed me. I'm glad it's over.

I was going to watch more David DeCoteau but now I don't know if I have the endurance for it. This was a horror movie but its only sense of tension was gained from the fact that it being entirely shot on video in a house made me feel like I was stuck in the house with the people in the movie. Like I, too, was having to take part in making this garbage. Nightmare fuel.

A college-age musician/writer rents a house to get some work done, but his girlfriend insists on throwing a sorority party with guest frat boys. Things go awry, however, when a succubus crashes the party.

"Dreamaniac" (1986) was the director's first real film and originally called "Succubus," but this changed after the success of "A Nightmare on Elm Street," which explains the tagline: 'You don't have to live on Elm Street to have a nightmare.' While it opens with a dark dream and there are surreal moments reminiscent of that popular film & franchise, it's at heart a cabin-in-the-woods slasher with the variation of a succubus as the antagonist.

The problem is that it's too one-note. The entire movie takes place in this house, mostly at night, which can be explained by the budget of $60,000 (equivalent to $176,000 today, factoring inflation). In other words, the production didn't have the funds for multiple locations. So, the events in the house had better be interesting enough to maintain the viewer's interest, but that's hardly the case.

The 80's ambiance is great, though, and the gore's well done, if that's your thang. Plus, there are several good-lookin' females, such as Kim McKamy as Pat (aka Ashlyn Gere), Sylvia Summers as Lily and Linda Watts as Jan (aka Linda Denise Martin), not to mention a couple of amusingly obnoxious ones, like Cynthia Crass as Francis. But the flick's strapped with too much male nudity (which is unsurprising given the director's orientation). The few positives simply aren't enough to make it worth the time. Speaking of which...

It runs 1 hour, 22 minutes, and was shot in Los Angeles.

GRADE: C-/D+

The first annoying thing you immediately notice about "Dreamaniac" are its unimaginably overlong opening credits. Why is it necessary to singularly display the names of all the lousy people that were co-responsible for this piece of crap? Guided by such horrible music, to boot! The second annoying thing you notice is that writer/director David DeCouteau's alarming obsession with naked male butts and tidy white underpants was already there in the beginning of his career during the 1980's .The third thing you notice – and sadly this feeling remains throughout the entire running time – is that "Dreamaniac" is an unendurably terrible and pathetic flick without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Under the command of trash-emperor Charles Band, DeCouteau brings the dull tale of a heavy metal fanatic (apparently they looked like complete dorks back in the eighties) who summons a succubus because he's horny and can't control his hormones. This female demon goes on slaughtering a whole bunch of ugly and dim-witted frat boys and frat girls; guests at the sorority party thrown in the metal fanatic's house by his girlfriend and her sister. The plot sounds basic and straightforward enough to potentially have become an unpretentious 80's slasher, but DeCouteau and his crew even managed to ruin that. It's boring as hell, the characters are all insupportable idiots, the cheap & cheesy make-up effects are laughable instead of unsettling and the disco-soundtrack is downright infuriating. I mean, they could have at least put a couple of satanic metal bands on the soundtrack? In short, this is one of the lousiest horror flicks of the 1980's and that means A LOT, so avoid like the plague.