Dream Demon (1988)
The virginal Gemma Redgrave suffers increasingly fraught and realistic nightmares as she fears consummating her impending marriage.
A bizarre oddity that rips off and really wants to be a British
A Nightmare on Elm Street but ends up more like
Freddy's Dead-The Final Nightmare.
The acting, from Redgrave in particular, is average at best. It's unfortunate but for me Gemma Redgrave doesn't have a voice that translates well to film. Be it this or her semi-frequent role in
Doctor Who, she appears to be reading from cue cards at a distance. Yet in her twenty minute interview on the Arrow Blu-ray she comes across as warm, affectionate and wonderfully natural and a pleasure to watch.
The film itself is a bit nuts. The dream sequences are outlandish and often pretty gory such as Gemma punching right through the grooms head on her wedding day, but Timothy Spall as the main 'dream demon' is too daft to take seriously. Almost carrying on as if her were still in Ken Russell's
Gothic from a couple of years earlier.If Robert Englund was Freddy Krueger then Spall is the equivalent of Funny Man. But it's still very watchable and certainly fast paced even if it's not at all scary.
What was kind of interesting was that in among the craziness there do appear to be metaphors for 1981's wedding of Charles and Diana throughout which seven years on seemed a bit weird.
I'd never seen
Dream Demon before so didn't know what to expect, although i wasn't really expecting comedy horror. The film has enough about it for me to want to watch it again in that batshit crazy style of the afore mentioned
Gothic. A film that i've truly come to adore over the years.
/ 5