Sunburst

Filmed in 1975 as "Sunburst" until it was released on VHS in the eighties retitled "Slashed Dreams" to take advantage of Robert Englund's popularity during the "Nightmare on Elm Street" craze, this seventy-four minute exercise in hiking and rape is an absolute waste of film and can't even be saved by the curvaceous Kathrine Baumann's wasted nude scenes. Written by Stacy Keach's brother James, who will always be Deputy Halik from "Moving Violations" to me, "Slashed Dreams" is about two life long friends, Jenny and Robert, who go hiking into the wilderness of Northern California to visit their mutual friend Michael played by Robert Englund who doesn't show himself until the final twenty minutes of the film. Why going to see Michael is so important to Jenny and Robert is never explained only that Jenny really wants to see him. Fair enough. The first forty-five minutes consists of the two traveling north and hiking through the woods. Sound like fun? It isn't. Nothing significant happens at all so why film any of this? While Jenny and Robert go skinny dipping they are spied on by two token hillbilly mountain boys Danker and writer/actor James Keach as Levon. Once the pair set their sites on Jenny's pair, well, what do you think goes through their minds? Later that night they return to rape Jenny. Enter Michael who says little and provides next to nothing as far as support except for some hippie rambling about "driving the devil out of your house". Way to counsel Freddy Krueger. Robert tries to redeem himself by fighting the rapists but, no shock here, he doesn't succeed. Afterwards Jenny comes to the realization that all is well. End of movie. What?

If this summary doesn't stop you from watching this mess than let me deliver the dagger to your heart in the form of Roberta Van Dere. Who is she you ask? She's responsible for singing all of the songs on the soundtrack and by singing I mean tone deaf caterwauling that is so annoying that I attempted to drive pencils into my ear canals. Her singing is so bad it defies belief that someone listened to her and said "you should do this professionally". Every song sounds exactly the same even her inappropriate howling following Jenny's rape. A cat thrown into a dryer would have sounded better than her. Do yourself a favor a leaf through and old Reader's Digest rather than waste your time on this crap.

I can now add this worthless thing to my worst 10 movies. It is about as thoughtless and ill conceived as anything put to celluloid. The plot and the motivations are bad enough. But there are so many distractions, I couldn't believe it. First, what's with the old gang. What about the young hothead boyfriend? Shouldn't he have shown up somewhere in all of this? Why even have him get into a confrontation with the lead. Then there's the guy they're going to see. It's Freddy Krueger, playing a nice guy who spouts philosophy. He's some skinny dork who went to the woods. What about the bad guys. How do you know, "We'll never see them again"? Shouldn't someone report the rape and get after those guys. After being accosted by the two, shouldn't someone's guard have been up a bit, just a little bit? How can one analyze something so idiotic? Suffice it to say, this isn't even campy funny. I think a good conclusion would have been an enormous meteor landing on the entire bunch. Oh. I forgot Rudy Valee. What the hell is he doing there?

After seeing Sunburst I'm still trying to figure out why Rudy Vallee bothered to appear in it. Certainly the audience this film was reaching at thousands of drive-ins across the country wasn't going to be buying his records.

This outdoors film which relies on a lot of nature shots to fill in the story gaps has Peter Hooten and Katherine Bauman dissatisfied with college and the imbeciles that they find going there lately. Possibly their friend Robert Englund who has gone back to the Sixties and back to nature with his tune in, turn on, and drop out philosophy may have the answer. He's off in the woods of Northern California and Hooten and Bauman are off to find him.

Unfortunately before they find Englund they run into a couple of bottom feeding inbreds played by James Keach and David Pritchard. More I cannot say because things do degenerate from here. Let's just say their actions might have stimulated a little of what goes in drive-in theaters so the exhibitors might have booked Sunburst with that in mind.

Robert Englund of course went on to play Freddy Kruger in several slasher flicks with Freddy as the central character. Vallee plays a small role as a storekeeper who still sings some of his old hits. He sounded a lot better on The Whiffenpoof Song in his prime.

Nice cinematography and Rudy Vallee, can't think of any other reason to watch Sunburst.

I saw this movie, as I think most people have these days, on the out of print Academy Home Entertainment videotape under the title Slashed Dreams. I doubt that is the original title, as it appears on the screen via a bad video effect, and appears to be blocking out the original title by being placed on a large green rectangle (probably Sunburst). The videotape dates from 1986, and since Robert Englund (who later played Freddy Kreuger) appears in it (albeit briefly, towards the end), the title is probably meant to suggest A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). None of the actors' names are mentioned on the box, although my box was cut, so maybe the names just got cut off. "Slashed Dreams" is probably also meant to suggest slasher films, but this is at most a proto-slasher; nobody gets killed, and the only slashing is of one bad guy by another.

The video box suggests that the movie starts with a skinny-dipping scene, with the characters watched by someone with a knife, and then flashes back to how they got there. In fact, it's entirely presented in chronological order, starting with a bunch of young people in college. In a class, they talk about the meaning of life, and where people have their roots; "in the earth," one suggests, "in heaven," suggests another.

One of the students, Jenny, brings up her friend Michael, who'd dropped out of college and moved into the mountains. Her boyfriend doesn't think much of a dropout, and he doesn't like Jenny's lifelong brainy friend either. At a frat party, her boyfriend gets really belligerent, and Jenny and her old friend drive off to find Michael.

On the way, they get directions at a country store. The proprietor is found in a back room, rehearsing his night club act (he says), talking and singing on a microphone. He's a former radio star who's been forgotten (played by the crooner Rudy Vallee). He's about the most chipper old man to ever warn a couple of young people not to go in the woods! He presses some Licorice Nips on them, and tries to impress on them the need for a knife.

They pass on the knife, and make their way into the woods, where they encounter a bear, and find a cabin they think might be Michael's. It's made out of rather thin branches, so that it is possible to see right through the walls. There are also windows, and at least two large holes in the roof, so that when they say they wish they could lock the door, it sounds rather funny!

There's an odd sort of rape scene, in which one of the assailants seems to be at most dry humping a sleeping bag (and he couldn't get it up either, we learn), and the other also seems to be doing some dry humping, but also does some bruising face-slapping. Later, some strange advice is given to the victim, to "push the demons out" and to find some "truth" in what happened.

The movie ends with one of the characters taking a slim illustrated hardcover book down from a shelf in Michael's cabin, and reading: "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.... And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed." These are two different passages (on pain, and on friendship) from Kahlil Gibran's popular (more then than now, I think) book The Prophet.

Not much of a horror movie, and may not have been intended to be one. Between the opening scenes in the college classroom, and the reading from The Prophet, and some of the dialogue in between, it seems the filmmakers may have been trying to reach for something meaningful, but...

Slashed Dreams (1975)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

The producer's tried to sell this off to the horror crowd in the Last House on the Left vein but it's more of a mix between Love Story and Deliverance. A guy and girl go into the woods of Northern California to look for a friend who has moved there. That night, while in the cabin, two rednecks beat the hell out of the guy and rape the girl. Will everything be okay? This is one of those movies that keep you entertained because you expect something to happen but when it never does you hit yourself for staying with the movie. Robert England plays the friend living in the woods.