nightmare
in a
damaged brain |
director/screenwriter
Romano Scavolini
producer
John L. Watkins
cinematographer
Gianni Fiore
music
Jack Eric Williams
editor
Robert T. Megginson
cast
Baird Stafford (George Tatum)
Sharon Smith (Susan Temper)
C.J. Cooke (C.J. Temper)
Mik Cribben (Bob Rosen)
Danny Ronen (Kathy the Babysitter)
Christina Keefe (George's Mother)
William Kirksey (George's Father)
Scott Praetorius (Young George)
mpaa rating: R or unrated
running
time: 100m (uncut)
u.s.
release: 1981
video
availability: VHS -
DVD (UK)
official
website
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I've been trying to track down
this nasty little slasher entry (known simply as Nightmare
in American theaters, where it swiftly came and went) for over
twenty years. Why? Because I happened to see a TV commercial
for it when I was about eleven, and it scared the shit
out of me. All I remembered was the image that gave me a night
or two of troubled sleep: a little boy running to his room away
from a masked psycho. Doesn't sound like much, but something
about the way it was edited, or the music, must've spooked me.
I'm not eleven any more, yet I have to admit a little frisson
of associative fear when that scene came up near the end of Nightmare
in a Damaged Brain (as it's titled in Britain, where it's
far better known than it is here -- more on that later). The
rest of the movie might've terrified me when I was eleven. These
days, I take it as the kind of grubby fun horror film I grew
up with when I got a little older and started seeing this sort
of thing on cable. The crappier a movie like this is, the better
I like it, and it looks especially reassuring next to the shiny,
antiseptic pap that passes for horror now. This was the early
'80s, man, when horror directors had no limits, no morals, no
shame.
The plot -- what I can safely
reveal of it -- goes as follows. George Tatum (Baird Stafford,
alternating between bug-eyed brooding and histrionic screeching)
is one fucked-up specimen. Plagued by gory nightmares, he wakes
up screaming in a straitjacket until he's fed anti-psychotic
pills by hospital attendants. According to a very '80s computer
screen, poor George has been diagnosed with "Schizophrenia,
Mild Amnesia, Homicidal Dream Fixation, Seizures." I love
the "Mild Amnesia" thrown in there along with the rest,
as if we couldn't guess that from the way he wakes up shrieking;
it gave me my first good laugh of the evening. Anyway, his dreams
seem to involve a tied-up man, a woman slapping said man around,
and a blood-spattered boy. Even those whose reading of Freud
is limited to his name on a book cover will twig right away to
the eventual reveal that the boy is George, the man and woman
are his parents, said 'rents are engaging in a little BDSM, and
young George has an axe to grind about it.
George, it seems, is the star
lab rat of a hush-hush experimental drug program; we hear various
psychologists and hangers-on talking about alerting the military
(!) to George's amazing progress. So these brilliant headshrinkers
let him go free, because obviously he's mentally ship-shape,
what with all the howling, blood-drenched nightmares he continues
to have (not to mention the Mild Amnesia). He's supposed to go
to a halfway house, but he never makes it there, which means
a few scenes with worried guys sitting at a computer and asking
it questions a computer can't answer in real life, like "Why
presumed dead?" (What is this, the 1981 prototype of Ask
Jeeves?) Some guy with a cigar (whose character is named in the
credits as, yes, Man With Cigar -- hey, did Chris Carter see
this movie?) yells at the head psychologist: "Now he's on
the loose and killing people -- and we can't have that."
Wouldn't be good P.R. for the program, don't you know.
Meanwhile, in Florida, a family
consisting of a single mom (Sharon Smith), her three kids (one
of whom, a boy named C.J. played by a boy named C.J., is a prank-playing
little prick -- which makes for lots of false scares as well
as the device of nobody believing the little bastard when he
really starts seeing ominous stuff), an easily scared
babysitter who picks the worst times to avail herself of a shower
(Danny Ronen, who refreshes herself under the spray not once
but twice, yet must've stipulated no nudity), and the mom's gentle
bearded photographer/boat-owner boyfriend (Mik Cribben), seem
to be the target of the unhinged George, who has travelled all
the way from rat-and-porno-infested, pre-Guiliani 42nd Street
to Daytona Beach. We know he's headed south because his car radio
helpfully informs us that now we're in Philadelphia, now
we're in South Carolina, etc.
The movie is really your standard
stalker-slasher show, with a soupcon of Freudianism and a twist
ending, but it's gained some notoriety on three fronts. First
and foremost, it's one of the bloodier examples of the subgenre
you're likely to witness -- in the uncut version, anyway, which
is readily available at various online rare-video outlets. Director
Romano Scavolini, whose background was in porn, fixates on the
spurting of red stuff the way he once might have zeroed in on
the spurting of other stuff. A decapitation produces so much
bright crimson gushing that I thought, "Gee, this could've
been yet another influence on Kill
Bill." About the only carnage we're spared is the
murder of a little boy, and even that might pull you up
short, even though it's offscreen: What horror movie nowadays
would dare to waste a little kid?
Notoriety #2 involves who was
actually responsible for said bloodletting on the set, a topic
of much dispute over the years. The film's distributors made
much of the participation of special-effects grandmaster Tom
Savini (Dawn
of the Dead), giving his name star billing in the ads;
Savini countered that he'd never worked on the movie's effects,
and talked lawsuit until his name was black-taped on the posters.
Other sources say that Savini did more work than he let on, and
that there exists photographic evidence of him on the set setting
up the movie's most memorable gag. Me, I tend to believe Savini,
who was doing much more convincing (and artful) effects than
these even before 1981.
Third, Nightmare in a Damaged
Brain (like so many other horror and exploitation flicks
at the time) gained entry into the "Video Nasties"
club in the UK, and until fairly recently had been banned there.
One of the owners of a video distributor handling the film was
actually sent to prison for six months of an eighteen-month
sentence (twelve of which were suspended). I personally don't
know that I'd be willing to go to jail over a Romano Scavolini
slasher movie, but those who consider America oppressive of the
arts should remember that it's been a very long time since any
movie was banned nationwide here.
So is the film worth all this
noise? You're bound to be disappointed if you expect Nightmare
in a Damaged Brain (I love that title, and obviously enjoy
typing it) to be commensurate with the controversies and rumors
surrounding it over the past 22 years. Take it for what it is:
a grungy, no-holds-barred grindhouse rat, with some decent acting
by the two main leads and laughably poor work by everyone else,
and with the unironic balls to rest its premise on "My Mother
Was a Dominatrix!" It took me pleasantly back to the days
of my youth as a budding horror-movie fan, when men were psychos
and women took lots of showers.
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