Nightmare (2005)

Whatever the artistic qualities of this film, I have to say that it has (at least) one redeeming point: it is a very interesting watch. One can only wander, what it would look like, had the director secured a hollywoodian budget for this project where poverty is occasionally visible, even though well masked. It is quite lynchian and just like with most every Lynch film, you find yourself enjoying the going-ons immensely, yet at the same time being deeply afraid that the ending will fail to produce a satisfactory solution. In this case, the film doesn't just end in coitus interruptus (a technique that makes Lynch very irritating) but does offer an 'instant satisfaction', that unrolls during the last 1 minute or so. Yet, as with all things instant, after the first rapture has evaporated, the whole thing seems somewhat silly and artificial. Nevertheless, the film captivated me, kept me guessing and was a very good way to spend 1,5 hours.

Nightmare is set in New York where film student director (Jason Scott Campbell) has just turned in a terrific film for his course, at a party he meets a girl named Natalia & they head upstairs to the bedroom to have sex. The next morning & they both wake up next to each other & notice a camcorder at the bottom of the bed pointed straight at them, intrigued they look at whats on the tape inside the camera & are shocked to see themselves brutally kill three women in that room but neither remember doing it & the room is spotless with no blood anywhere. That morning in film class the student has to pitch an idea for a new project & decides to use the scenario he finds himself in, as the events surrounding the tape comes to light he films them as uses his real life situation as a script for his film...Co-written & directed by first time filmmaker Dylan Blank I will not beat around the bush here & say quite simply that I hated Nightmare, I hated just about everything about it. Currently on the IMDb 'User Comments' section for Nightmare there are 6 comments (this will obviously increase over time...) & four of them give Nightmare 8 stars out of 10, one gives it 9 out of 10 while the only reviewer who has more than one comment (a respected reviewer of horror films in general on the IMDb) gave it a lowly 4, I wouldn't mind putting money on the fact all those comments praising this piece of crap came from people involved in the making of it, why only one comment apiece? I simply can't believe some of the comments here that I read, I think I watched a completely different film. For start those same said comments suggest that Nightmare is surreal, I'm sorry but I just call it an absolutely mess of a film that makes zero sense, no actually it makes less than zero sense & it's incredibly annoying, irritating & frustrating to endure. I don't really know where to begin with Nightmare & about the things which just make no sense of which there are plenty & are seemingly there for random reasons, there's something about tapes which is never resolved, there's apparently a killer going around which is never resolved, there's some out of nowhere scene featuring this guy (we never even find out his name) in a prison cell & then being interrogated & the whole making of a film within a film is just poorly done. The film has no story, it has no conclusion or resolution, the character's are awful & have no background or depth, it makes no sense & it's an incredibly painful experience to sit though in one go. Did the makers even have a script? It feels like sometimes they are just making it up as they go along. The more I think about Nightmare the more I hate it. What's the point of coming up with a potentially interesting story about mysterious tapes which seem to show people killing other people even though they don't remember doing it & then not even bother resolving it or going anywhere with it?Besides a terrible script that makes no sense, has no story & is just generally all round rubbish I also hated the way it was put together. The whole film being made within a film is just so irritating it's untrue, particularly towards the end your never sure what is is part of the actual film or what is being filmed & frustratingly it's never resolved or explained. There are often long stretches you can't understand what the hell is going on, the end filmed with a camcorder in particular is one of the worst filmed sequences in a professional film I have ever seen, it's literally impossible to figure out whats happening. It's all meant to be surrealistic, trippy & abstract but as I said for me Nightmare just came across as a huge mess from start to finish. At times it felt like Nightmare was randomly edited together by a chimpanzee with a pair of scissors & a roll of sticky-tape. Looking like it was shot in the director's apartment on a camcorder it's quite hard to even categorise this, I certainly wouldn't call it a horror film that's for sure. There's little in the way of gore, there's a bit of fake blood splashed around & a severed hand but nothing else. It doesn't even feel like a horror film, there's nothing scary or creepy or atmospheric here at all. There's a lot of nudity but most of the cast aren't exactly model material if you know what I mean.Nightmare looks every bit as low budget as is so obviously was, I just don't see anything here that impressive. The photography is point & shoot stuff, there are no special effects, there's no style or atmosphere & there's nothing here to distinguish it from the hundreds of low budget shot on a camcorder flicks out there. The acting didn't impress me, I thought it was terrible to be honest.Nightmare is like it's title suggests a bit of a nightmare, to watch that is. Everyone is entitled to an opinion & for those of you who rated this an 8 or 9 that's fine, for me though I thought this was absolutely terrible & an incredibly frustrating mess of a film to watch.

An impressive first feature with solid acting, lots of nudity, blood and gore and a plot that tumbles under and eats itself in concentric circles. (Whatever that means…). I must admit, I walked in 32 minutes late at the Boston Underground Film Festival screening and but was immediately stuck by the images and action and remained riveted right up until the ending that was handled with the right mix of ambiguity and clarity of 'clues'—to lead you to believe you understood what happened, but was not quite sure. I think that's a good quality to leave an audience with for this kind of picture. I mean, what would life be without mystery?I particularly liked the bald creepy crew member who, in one shot, looks exactly like Robert Blake in Lost Highway—a film that was definitely an inspiration for this one. The high def video looks great—just like film--and it's quite a professional piece of work. Plus, this film had the most gorgeous shot of all the films I saw at this years BUFF, but I'm not going to tell you which one.

Oh boy, here we have another over-ambitious young filmmaker who single-handedly intends to restore everything that's wrong with nowadays horror cinema…Pardon my cynicism but we all heard this before and – usually – these youngsters fail to live up to their own expectations. For his debut film, videostore clerk turned director Dylan Bank comes up with a psychedelic but immensely confusing story about a film student who makes a movie about his own nightmare that miraculously appear to be taped on camera every morning when he wakes up. The idea is admirable and the film does feature a handful of nice touches, but Dylan Bank never really seems to realize that his visions and interpretations on horror AREN'T groundbreaking or even that shocking. This type of 'mental assault'-cinema is the territory of genius directors like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Shinya Tsukamoto, only their films are more fascinating and truly a lot more disturbing! The story material has potential but "Nightmare" lacks involvement and commitment with the characters whereas, with Lynch, you pretty much feel like you're inside the protagonists' heads and you fear what they fear! The film often just exists of blurry and roughly edited images that make no sense or add nothing to the basic premise at all, but Bank uses them (as padding?) anyway. New characters and locations are introduced randomly and they simply disappear again without any form of coherence. Also, for being a new type of horror film, "Nightmare" doesn't contain much atmosphere, scary moments or even violent images. There's quite a lot of nudity (the non-artistic kind), the acting performances are acceptable and the use of uncanny music is very good. Worth a look if you're in an experimental mood once.