‘Bad Dreams’ (1988) - Andrew Fleming.

Andrew ‘The Craft’ Fleming’s reality-warping nightmare ‘Bad Dreams’ is arguably one of the more boldly risk-taking, artfully made horror films of the 1980s. Produced by Hollywood heavyweight, Gale Anne Hurd, and dazzlingly bejewelled with a super talented cast. With an especially engaging performance by handsome, Bruce ‘Re-animator’ Abbott as the kindly doctor, Karmen and, Richard Lynch is deliciously unnerving as the mesmerically mad, evilly enigmatic patriarch of his darkly blissed-out ‘Unity Field’ happy clappers. Fatefully, one of Harris's younger, far less credulous followers proves frustratingly resistant to his suicidal, Jim Jones screed. The rebellious, Cynthia being played with enormous sensitivity by the talented, Jennifer Rubin.

It is only after the disorientated, Cynthia awakens from her prolonged coma that her nightmares begin in earnest! The starkly clinical, Cuckoo’s Nest environment providing a suitably volatile backdrop for the monstrous, drug-induced, psychedelicized, mind-warping mayhem, Harris brings back from his fiery, self-induced hell! Mealy-mouthed, ill-founded complaints of ‘Bad Dreams’ merely being an ‘Elm Street’ clone are erroneous.Freddy Krueger was a wise-cracking cartoon, abounding with a Looney Tunes vivacity within teenaged fever dreams, while apocalyptic apostle, Harris’s theologically twisted machinations makes him far more of an oblique, real-world threatening nightmare! Sadly there have been all-too many religious despots, and thus far ‘Evil Fred’ exits solely in a rapidly fear-diminished franchise! 

Cynthia’s horrific ongoing trauma and the no less terrible torment of her emotionally disturbed compatriots generates greater sympathy than the predictably shrill T&A carnage carrion from yet another anonymously hack-happy Halloween clone. ‘Bad Dreams’ has remarkably robust dramatic qualities that allow the eerie phantasmagorical elements to insinuate themselves that much further into the viewer’s reeling nut. Tension is rigorously maintained until its breathless, nerve-flaying climax! Fleming’s finely wrought, hallucinatory 80s horror classic has lost little of its protean ability to put the fear of the godless in you!