DVD Review: Nightmare (Never Wake Up)
Nightmare (Never Wake Up) (2005)
Studio: MPI Home Video
Release Date: September 29, 2009
Directed By: Dylan Bank
Cast: Jason Scott Campbell, Nicole Roderick
Review By: Annie Riordan
Short summary: Nightmare is a film about a group of film students who are making a film about a guy who’s making a film about a film he saw.
Expanded summary: After his first film wins the respect and admiration of his classmates, our arrogant up and coming filmmaker is confident that his career as a director is assured. Looking like a desperately poor man’s Christian Bale, our dubious protagonist attends a party to celebrate his own brilliance, where the pretentious and the sycophantic alike circle around him like vultures, hoping to become a part of his inner circle. He ends up in bed with the hottest chick at the party, an aspiring actress with a Klaus Kinski fetish. It’s a classic story of boy meets muse…at first.
Upon awakening the following morning, our hungover lovers find a camera mounted on a tripod at the foot of their bed. Convinced that someone filmed them having sex, they play it back for laughs. But instead of an amateur porno, they see themselves engaging in the brutal slaughter of several young girls. But there are no bodies to be found, no blood to be seen and no memory of having committed such a heinous act. Determined to solve the mystery, they decide to make a film about the film they’ve just seen, hoping that by doing so, the mystery will somehow solve itself.
Instead, the mystery deepens and becomes even more convoluted and confusing. It’s an hour and 51 minutes of dream sequences, hallucinations and staged reenactments which lead nowhere and clear up nothing. And when all else is exhausted, yet another in an endless string of sex scenes is thrown in. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m no prude. But after the first steamy sex scene, the almost constant nudity and joyless banging for the camera become tiresomely tedious. You get so used to seeing the cast butt naked that it loses any shock value it might have been going for and becomes about as entertaining as staring at the contents of a butcher shop window. Maybe that was the point, I don’t know.
Which leads me to suspect that Nightmare is one of those films that says: if you don’t like it, you just didn’t get it. And yeah, I didn’t get it. I’m not even sure there was anything to get, unless perhaps the films target audience was pretentious film students and the entire thing was an overlong in-joke. I wanted a resolution after sitting through 2 confusing hours of murder and mayhem. Sue me. But in the end, Nightmare simply stops, without offering an explanation, an apology or any coherent logic to take home in a doggie bag. To be honest, I’ve woken up in the middle of actual nightmares that made more sense than this film.
Brutal As Hell Rating: 1 1/2 out of 5
