Horror movies are hard to do these days. Getting an audience member to feel the terror and feel for the characters at the same time is not easy for today’s filmmakers. For the most part you either scare the audience, or you have good enough characters to care about when the scares aren’t enough. Nightmare, directed by Dylan Bank, is a film with good characters but no real scares and almost no real center to make it’s rather wacky plot even remotely tangible.
When an unnamed film school student (Jason Scott Campbell) wakes up after an odd sexual encounter with the gorgeous and intense actress Natalya (Nicole Roderick), he finds a camera with a tape inside sitting on the bed. The tape contains an eerie tagline on the front: “Never Wake Up.”
The film student plays the tape and finds a rather brutal murder taking place that involves him and his new found love. Is it a real event? Is it some film left unfinished by the main character? To find the answers to these questions, The filmmaker (along with his film school buddies) decides to re-enact the events within the film in order to piece together the mystery behind the tape.
I tend to go for the films, sometimes, that avoid a straightforward plot structure. However left of center they become, these films are only as good as the center that brings them back together. If there are too many distractions from what's happening, it can become frustrating for the viewer.
Takashi Miike's Audition is an example of how to moderate the need to go off-track. For most of the film, until the very last half, the movie is played like a typical romantic drama. Slowly but surely, while still staying on the original premise, things begin to happen that seem out of left-field, but keep the film from being dizzy.
Article comments
1 - Fran
Nice review. Premise sounds very creepy. Think I just might want to see this one.