Dream Demon

DREAM DEMON:

There's an old screenwriting adage that says, "You can break all the rules you want as long as you don't bore the audience."  Dream Demon (1988) is a competently made piece of horror filmmaking with above average filmmaking credits across the board.  It's often beautiful, sometimes surreal and intermittently intriguing.  But it's also boring as hell.  

Diana (Jemma Redgrave) is engaged to marry a stuffy war hero, which makes her a target for tabloid fodder.  While fighting off a pair of overeager journalists, she befriends a mysterious American, Jenny (Kathleen Wilhoite), who claims her deceased parents used to live in Diana's redecorated flat.  Oddly enough, Diana has been plagued by a series of nightmares involving the previous residents, nightmares that seem to be having an effect on the real world.  

The obvious thematic influence here is the Elm Street series, but director Harley Cokeliss' film is only tangentially related at best.  There is no wisecracking antagonist; in fact, the film has trouble coming up with any antagonist at all, relying mostly on actor Timothy Spall (of Harry Potter fame) made up as a decomposing - but still exaggeratedly lecherous - corpse.  Our lead characters spend most of their time wandering through a dimly lit labyrinth of tunnels, which look an awful lot like repurposed set from Clive Barker's Hellraiser.

Dream Demon shares that same classy British take on the genre, but the plot is so scattered - and the scares so few - it's hard to stay invested, despite the admirable performances and production design.  The highlight is a comic epilogue involving our overly aggressive journalists, a scene which Cokeliss inexplicably deletes from his new directors cut (not to worry, it's still there on the included theatrical version).

Arrow Video's Blu-ray looks remastered and regraded, which it is.  The 2K restoration was a bit of a miracle as the film's negative disappeared after a corporate bankruptcy.  In fact, Cokeliss' interview about the process of tracking down his missing film is a highlight of the bonus features, which includes more sit-downs with producer Paul Webster, actors Jemma Redgrave, Mark Greenstreet, Nickolas Grace and Annabelle Lanyon, plus composer Bill Nelson.  There's also a contemporary Making Of that pulls together even more information, along with trailers, image galleries and a collector's booklet.

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