Nightmare Weekend (1986) Starring Debbie Laster, Dale Midkiff & Debra Hunter Directed by Henry Sala Written by George Faget-Benard & Robert Seidman

The picture begins with some guys doing some stuff in the dark that we can't really see because of how dimly lit the movie is, and because of how muddled n' murky the abominable transfer is. Get used to it. The movie ends much the same way, and there are several scenes sprinkled throughout where you can't see shit. This must've been what it felt like when Ray Charles' cruel-ass friends took him to the multiplex for this birthday. Oh well, if ya can't have sight, at least ya can have sound. While the visuals in the opening scenes are decidedly unwatchable, the music is something to write home to mom about, yes sir. The track that bookends the film, Miriam Stockley's "Nightmare Fantasy" (the official NIGHTMARE WEEKEND theme song, don'tcha know?), is a righteous, rollicking example of classic 1980's cheese pop-rock stupidity. It's one of the highlights of the movie, and definitely the best part of the flick's triumphantly lame-o soundtrack, which seems to be otherwise made up entirely of terrible fucking stock music, sounding like an uneven combination of standard tracks you might find in a porno, in a soap opera, or in an elevator. But "Nightmare Fantasy" stands out, and should definitely get the blood pumpin' if you're a fan of movies with similar song-filled soundtracks, like SAVAGE STREETS or KILLER WORKOUT.

As mentioned, her daddy's a scientist, which of course means there's gonne be some fucked-up experimental ickiness afoot in the immediate future. Rest assured though, papa's not a "mad" scientist. Just a hairy, ugly one. The real villain here is his assistant, a big-boned, ball-bustin', bipolar bee-yatch deluxe with bad hair, bushy eyebrows, and a serious talent for spoutin' catty-ass insults at the drop of a hat. The first moment you see her on-screen, she's being a total cunt. There was never even the faintest hint of question in any audience member's mind, not ever, not anytime in the history of planet Earth in which this movie has been watched, as to whether or not a grisly death awaited this twat at the climax of the film. I'm not spoiling a damn thing by telling you she gets her comeuppance by motion picture's end.

There's also some horny, troublemaking, leather-clad punk rock biker baddies hanging out at the local bar, acting cocky and occasionally trying to rape young girls. You know, the usual. Oh, and I almost forgot the group of college co-ed's who've volunteered to subject themselves to some of the doctor daddy's experiments for a fat wad of cashy-money. Bah, what does it matter? By about twenty minutes in, you won't be able to remember who the hell is who. I guarantee it.

NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is one of those movies where none of the characters are likeable, and even the good guys just come across as annoying or dumb. Every guy in the movie is a massive meathead, and every women is a walking stereotype (we got sluts, bitches, and innocent princesses). Add to that an enormous amount of painfully homoerotic scenes featuring mustachioed d-bags rockin' out with their walkman while garbed in shortie-shorts, or rubbin' up wayyyy too close to one another, and you have a kooky combination that simultaneously leaves me both amused and horrified.

The plot, as best I can piece together, involves the patriarchal scientist's latest breakthrough (some kind of computer system that allows him to control people by, uh, making them swallow gigantic silver balls... which occasionally fly around killing folks) being used (bum bum bum!!!) for evil instead of good. ::gasp:: See his traitorous, Adrienne Barbeau hairdo-sportin', Bitch-with-a-capital-Cunt assistant has sold the good professor's ass out for thirty pieces of silver (give or take), and is looking to test out the man's devices in the most nefarious ways possible, at the behest of some unseen benefactor. That's right, like something out a bad James Bond movie, our resident bad girl takes her orders from a mysterious man vieled in shadow (as if the whole movie itself weren't already veiled in shadow... seriously, who lit this thing?). As to the mystery villain's identity, I can't quite be sure, but my money's on Dr. Claw.

Anyway, as all this is happening, the doctor's daughter is discovering love for the first time, falling head over heels for Dale Midkiff's aforementioned white pants-wearin' Don Jaun character. At the same time, those co-ed's, and their boyfriends (who all look wayyy too old to be railin' fresh-faced college chicks), are doin' what they do best. Namely, not a whole lot. They don't really seem to do much of anything at all in th movie, really. They ride around in a limo, fuck, shower, fuck, partake in gratuitous spandex-stretching aerobics class sequences, fuck, boogie, fuck, get scared by tarantulas, fuck, and die. Hand to god, I ain't foolin', these bimbos spend a helluva lot o' time with their legs in the air. Unfortunately, most of the sex scenes are rendered painfully non-erotic due to a variety of factors. Sometimes it's because the girl in particular is just plain ugly (it's never a matter of the guy being too ugly... they're all fucking ugly). Sometimes it's because the scene is so dark and dim as to be made utterly unwatchable. And, in one case, it's because the lady doing the sexin' alternates the whole time between some kind of twisted interpretive dance routine and pretending to be, like, a vampire-lizard... thing. I don't know what's supposed to be happening here, I just know it killed my erection with the efficiency of a sniper on a grassy knoll in Dallas.

Mostly, NIGHTMARE WEEKEND just seems like a haphazard collection of completely random occurrences, the result of maybe two or three drastically different movies edited together with no regard whatsoever for the way that the disparate plotlines simply didn't jibe with one another. The movie jerks back and forth between day and night, hopping from location to location with little rhyme or reason. One minute a computer hacker handpuppet is helping our heroine discover the meaning of the strange new feelings that are causin' her loins to tingle, then the next we're seeing scenes of illegal motorcycle racing, then a poolside sequence whose sole purpose seems to be the modeling of day-glo neon 80's bathing suits and wet t-shirts, then we're on to the most gawky, awkward fight I've ever seen since those two chess club nerds tried out for amateur wrestling at my high school back in 2001. Time and time again, we're dragged roughly from scenes of romance, rape, and scientific progress, to nonsensical party shenanigans wherein suddenly everyone's having sex and dying. You'd think that so many spontaneous explosions of fucking and killing would be a good thing, and on a base level they are, but a lot of the time it's just confusing n' frustrating. What's even more baffling is the fact that I still (still!) don't know if I necessarily consider all this disastrous filmmaking crudity to be a good thing or a bad thing.

If nothing else, NIGHTMARE WEEKEND certainly has the market cornered on cheesy and weird. And did I mention all the nudity and sex? Yeah, lots of nudity and sex. There's some pretty good gore, too, but it tends to get damned by its miserable presentation. One sequence features a guy getting killed by having a gaping hole torn out of his throat, then getting tossed in the lake, before finally (somehow) exploding. Trust me, it makes as much sense on-screen as it did just now with me describing it to you. But at least it's gory, right? Meh. What good is splatterific eye candy if ya can barely make out in all that dark muddiness?

It's obvious that the script think that it's much smarter and much more relevant than it really is, begging for legitimacy as a philosophically deep meditation on the dangers of ambiguous ethics in science, as well as a psychologically complex exploration into innocence and desire. Witness, for example, the scenes in which they take great pains to show that the sheltered scientist's daughter is little more than a girl living in a woman's body, with womanly impulses that she doesn't understand. I tell ya, this chick's got more psychosexual soul-searching to do than Richard Simmons.

Really, for all its spastic gobbing, NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is a romance, a tale of forbidden love between two fucked-up freaks. One, a luscious lolita who plays video games that can kill. The other, a barrel-chested Suzuki enthusiast whose memories are haunted by something traumatic haunting his past. All in all, they both got a lot of baggage to sift through, not the least of which are all those killer spheres, overprotective hand puppets, alcoholic limo drivers, and motorcycle-riding rapists. NIGHTMARE WEEKEND truly is a love story for the ages. Zoinks!

It's a cyclone storm of cornball 80's clichés n' eccentricities, cardboard performances from overacting hacks, dopey n' didactic dialogue, amusingly bad sped-up car footage (think Benny Hill), and a veritable clone farm full of Freddy Mercury/Tom Selleck lookalikes. How, I ask, how can a movie whose finale is predicated on the joys brought upon by exposing us to lobotomized zombie skanks, scissor-weilding mind-controlled strumpets, and melty-faced mutant women be this bad?

I blame most of NIGHTMARE WEEKEND's negative elements purely on the effects of editing room fuckery. Seriously, who edited this bloody film? Anyone??? Anyone at all?!? I've rarely seen a movie so poorly edited. It's choppy as all hell, and, at times, flows so quickly and chaotically that the paper-thin plot is evaporated entirely. You start to think that maybe you're missing something, because you're hopelessly loss as to what's going on. But, trust me, you're not missing anything at all. There's nothing else to see. That's it. "Did I miss some key plot point?" you inquire. No, you did not. The writers just didn't bother to write one. That, or the editors cut it out.

This picture must've been thoroughly, brutally gutted in the editing room, to the point where the movie's almost not even worth watching. Then again, the movie is probably more worth watching now than if its presumably lackluster plot actually did manage to make some kind of sense. At least now it's a good example of b-movie weirdness at its weirdest... and worst.

This kind of craziness is definitely my cup of (polluted) tea. It's awesomely nutzoid and unintelligible, but still frustratingly so at the same time. In that sense, it's not the best cup of tea I've ever had. Far from it, in fact. But it certainly serves it's purpose, and I'm glad I own this flick. Not like it cost me more than pennies on the dollar to pick it up anyway. If you're like me, you like movies that defy description. NIGHTMARE WEEKEND most definitely defies description. Honestly, I was thinking about skipping the plot description entirely this time, 'cause it won't really help. The movie is an almost surrealistic succession of psychedelic, disjointed, phantasmagorical images that fail to gel into a single coherent storyline. Think of it as a cross between BOARDINGHOUSE and some sort of shitty, bottom dollar, rainbow-colored take on THE BEYOND.

Some of the more memorable moments not yet mentioned include the numerous, endless scenes of retards having sex with each other, dancing, and dying in their tightie-whities thanks to the monstrous machinations of some wayward orbs. One guy dies with a mouthful of panties and a body full of spasms, while another girl meets her end thanks to a homicidal toothbrush. Another chick chokes to death on coffee (yes, coffee), then reanimates and starts gettin' hot n' heavy with a gigantic spider!!! Then there's the anticlimactic finale, wherein the epic clash between the protagonists and the antagonist is played out with an exchange of words and insults... and that's about it. I found that scene in particular to be perversely pleasurable, for all the wrong reasons.

Much of the movie makes about as much sense as a cyborg in a henhouse, and it's not just because of a cluttered narrative trying to preach about the moral implications of technology and science. Nor is it solely because of the editing bay antics (which I imagine consisted of a Fetal Alcohol Syndrome-affected child smashing his face repeatedly into the editing bay controls). There's also the fact that, as I brought up earlier, there's as much visual stimulation in this flick as the fucking womb might fucking provide. You could change the title of the movie from "NIGHTMARE WEEKEND" to "UNSEEN PEOPLE DOING UNSEEN THINGS IN THE DARK" and it would've been right-on. It's genuinely difficult to tell what any of the characters are doing whatsoever half the time, and the very tail end o' the film is almost completely non-visible. Speaking of the film's finish, it's also worth noting how abrupt and bizarre the film ends. Eh, whatever. At least that sweet-ass, so-bad-it's-good theme song gets to play again.

This film probably shouldn't be viewed by anyone who doesn't consider themself to be a true blue cinemasochist. If you don't love "bad" movies, then you'll most likely want to give NIGHTMARE WEEKEND a pass, because that's exactly what it is. If you don't mind imagining what it's like to be blind, or, occasionally, wishing you were, and if you don't mind movies whose plots are dependent on the believability of psychic puppets, computers that can control everything, and flying silver balls of death that are not related at all to the PHANTASM franchise, you might get a kick out of this stinker. It's completely bizarre, but not entirely satisfying. Still, for some people, I know, bizarre is good enough. There are no brilliant examples of Shakespearean dialogue delivered by shockingly talented Shakespearean thespians here, just walkman-obsessed dancing, mustachioed losers who think that's what they're providing. Honestly, the green-haired handpuppet is the best part of this fucking movie. That, and all the tits.

Until next slime...
Stay sick!
Your pickled pal,
William Weird.

Rating: 3 out of 5 caged canines controlled by computers Recommendation: rent it
Best moment: doctor daddy gets whacked in the bag o' the noggin and is then shibari-tied to the toilet