You can always spot a horror anthology that began life as a TV show (or, in this case, an unrealised TV pilot) because the individual stories always tend to hit the ‘here’s the moral!’ button pretty hard. Sometimes that can be annoyingly patronising but sometimes the moral can be so well disguised that it’s not until the end credits roll you realise you’ve been hit with the crypt-keeping equivalent of Aesop’s Fables. And that’s pretty much what you’ve got with the ridiculously entertaining Nightmares, a fantastic wedge of ‘80s horror cheese wherein a host of familiar faces teach us lessons it would be best to heed, especially if nicotine addiction, video game addiction, loss of religious faith and how rodents and homeowners don’t mix are among the life problems you’re encountering right now.
The kick-off, Terror in Topanga, features The Sentinel’s Cristina Raines as a California housewife who rates going on a late-night drive to buy cigarettes above the fact that a vicious serial killer is stalking her neighbourhood. No prizes for what happens when her car runs out of gas. It’s probably the weakest of the quartet but Ms. Raines’ is terrific, even if the fade-out dialogue will make your eyes roll hard enough to fall out of your head.
The Bishop of Battle follows obsessive video games hustler Emilio Estevez as he attempts to reach the hallowed thirteenth level of the Bishop of Battle arcade game and then lives to regret his persistence. Or does he? The outcome won’t be a surprise for anthology veterans, but it’s still a great little story with some surprisingly neat effects for a low-budget 1983 movie.
Is it a shock that Lance Henricksen’s episode is the best? Probably not, even if this tightly structured vignette about a disillusioned priest who finds himself pursued on a lonely highway by a sinister black truck is just a blatant rip-off of Spielberg’s Duel. Who could the driver be? For those who are slow on the uptake, the inverted cross hanging from the psycho’s rear-view mirror is a heavy-handed clue.
This leaves us with Night of the Rat, in which Alien’s Veronica Cartwright and The Thing’s Richard Masur discover a giant cat-killing rodent making nasty holes behind their sideboard. Will it munch on Veronica’s arrogant husband before the viewer reaches through the TV screen and strangles him ourselves? If you want to find out, we predict some naff green-screening in your future.
For a film that’s well over thirty years old, Nightmares looks surprisingly fresh, and the addition of an interview, an audio commentary and a booklet (not available for review although the contents sound nice) make this a no-brainer for horror fans who secretly miss the days of chunky Walkmans, Karate Kid headbands and inappropriately bouncy hair. Go on, put the nasty back into nostalgia. You know you want to (squeak, squeak).
