Sandman

Nick Hanson (Eric Woster) and his child daughter Amy (Tiffany Ballenger) move from Montana to Los Angeles searching for a new life. He rents a house with piping problems and he decides to work as a plumber and fix the pipe. On the basement, he finds bones and skulls buried below his house. A further investigation shows that the house was built on an ancient cemetery, but there were also recent bones. Later he will discover that there is a gateway to the past through one of the walls. An evil spirit is released in the house and starts to haunt Nick and his best friend.

"Sandman" (1996) is a weird and confused movie that does not make much sense. In the cover of the Brazilian VHS, it is explained that the director and main character Eric Woster died in the house where his character lives by natural causes in the last day of shooting. If the viewer pays attention, Eric Woster was also one of the writers of the story. Therefore, probably most of the edition of the film was performed without his participation. But anyway, it is not a totally bad movie and has some interesting scenes and sequences. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Sandman - O Mestre dos Sonhos" ("Sandman - The Master of the Dreams")

Note: On 28 July 2022, I saw this film again.

Picked this up thinking it was a different Sandman movie, by the description I was not expecting much but when I popped the tape in I found myself quite entertained.

Sandman has a lot going on inside it. Time travel, car chases, a psycho killer, bar fights and stop motion dolls. Most times all of this would make for a confused movie, and don't get me wrong, I didn't totally understand what was happening but it all gelled together.

Sandman is well acted and has surprisingly good effects (minus the stop motion doll - wtf?!)

It's a shame lead and director Woster committed suicide after filming wrapped, he could have gone on to have been someone. Sadly, as it stands, sandman got a very limited vhs release and has since slipped into the cracks of time.

SANDMAN is an extremely rare little horror movie that deserves a larger audience. For a low budget, independent project, SANDMAN is remarkably effective. Some of the acting is not so good, but the script is smart and creative with all sorts of interesting characters and surreal touches. Even the clichéd theme of "descent into madness" (not the only theme explored by the narrative…I'm not giving anything away) is portrayed in an original fashion (more a "death of affect" or "moral blindness" than yet another Jack Nicholson inspired psycho-trip) Like another reviewer, I think the abrupt transitions contribute rather than detract from the quality of the movie and it has a stylish, disorienting feel which matches the content.

I would love for this to become a cult film so that maybe someday we could get a copy of SANDMAN on DVD and some sort of fitting tribute to the director. Judging by this film, he had a lot of creativity and talent in him and would have likely gone on to great things. I'd love to see something wide screen and cleaned up and closer to what Eric Wostee intended.