 Hello, and welcome to today's edition of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Films. But to start things off, what are we drinking? Wolf's Bane English Black Bitter. Today we're going to feature 1988 Bad Dreams. Andrew Fleming directed this movie. He also co-wrote it. He did the craft. Jennifer Rubin is in this, and she was in Dream Warriors. How fitting. Yeah. Richard Lynch is in this. Fuck, he's been in a million things. Just to mention a few, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Puppet Master 3, and Deathsport. And the reason I wanted to mention Deathsport, it's a movie with David Carradine. David Carradine plays a good guy, and his name is Kaz O'Shea. In my old band from back in the day, we named her a band after David Carradine's character. But we're also thinking about naming the band after Richard Lynch's character, which is Ankar Moore. Harris Eulen is in this. He was in Scarface. It captured me. Yeah, my cop. Whoever said you was one. And Ghostbusters. Have you burned at the stake? The movie starts off in 1975, and our main character, Cynthia, has just joined a cult. The cult is called Unity Fields. The cult is ran by a man called Franklin Harris. The final night of Unity Fields, baptizing them with this gasoline. On the floor in the living room, can't they do this outside? Yeah. Look at the fucking mess you're making. Then of course later you know why. Starts everything on fire. The house blows up. Fire department comes, and they find one survivor, while it's Cynthia. They take her back to the hospital, and she's in a coma now. 13 years later, it's 1988, she finally wakes up from the coma. The cops are there, right? They want to know what happened. But she doesn't remember. They send Cynthia to this group therapy, ran by this nice, good-looking, young psychiatrist. It's at this group therapy, we meet all the colorful characters of the movie, you know. Ralph, who's like a masochist, who looks like his eyebrows are painted on. He is super thick. It's during this group therapy she gets a flashback, tells us the cops, the cops finally find out what happened. It's a goddamn Jonestown. Girls have taken a shower, and they're kind of in the locker room, smoking in this locker room just after taking a shower, like jeez, you don't even have your clothes on yet. You're in a robe, and you're smoking. Cynthia has this kind of like vision, Harris taking one of her friends that she's made through therapy, Lana, giving her this baptism, and then he starts drowning her. Lana is actually really drowned in real life in the pool. Starting to have more visions, right, of this Harris. He's all burned up too, and like all mutilated. He looks creepy, trying to get her to join them, hinting that you have to kill yourself in order to join us. Cynthia's friends from the therapy group start getting picked off one by one, committing suicide. Each one is kind of linked to a vision that Cynthia has. There's a lead doctor at Beresford, his name. He fires Dr. Carmen, who's the young, good-looking doctor. He's outside, he's got his box full of all his belongings and everything. So pissed off and stressed out, no. So he reaches into his pocket, and he pulls out a pill, like one pill that he has left. He's like, doctor, I'll write myself a prescription in the morning. He takes the pill, notices that Beresford is in the parking lot, and he just drives towards him and just fucking runs him over. He creeps him in. Then he backs up, and Beresford is like against this wall. Then he runs into him again, like, you can hear his bones all crunching. Then again, like, he's listening to all that like, that classical music. It was all a big vision. These pills that Beresford's been administering to the group give hallucinations. Dr. Carmen goes back to the hospital, even though he's fired, to confront Beresford on what he's been doing and to save Cynthia. That's where we're gonna end it, because the shit's gonna hit the fan big time. Keep watching the movie to find out what happened. Obviously, this movie parallels Nightmare on Elm Street, plain as day. Yeah, not only do you have an actress from Dream Warriors in it, a main bad guy who's coming back to haunt you in your dreams, who is burned to death in a fire, and he's all melted up. Which is funny, because the actor in real life was in a fire. And he, in real life, he's melted up, and then they make him look even more melted up for the movie. So he's twice melted up. It's like he was made for the part. Freddie Cougar at this point is no longer a scary villain. He's basically an MTV fucking rock star. This movie takes that idea, and they give it a really good villain who's not hokey and cheesy, intelligent, he's a scary fucking guy. Stuff like this actually did happen, right? There's cult leaders and cults in it. Exactly, like Jonestown, right? So I mean, this kind of shows the dynamic between that and the hold that like a cult leader can have on somebody, right? Cynthia still believes in the values of the cult. Yeah, and still defends him to a degree, right? Even though she knows he was wrong and killing people, they still believe in the values, which is kind of scary. Exactly. That's how powerful these cult guys are. It's truly horrifying, right? Does this heiress really exist in reality? Yeah. Is Cynthia doing his bidding and killing people? Yeah. Or are people just committing suicide plain and simple? Or is Beresford's drugs causing all this to happen, you know? You don't know. That's the cool thing about the movie is the mystery. The casting is really good in this movie. Richard Lynch as the bad guy, all of the 80s teens. Yeah, exactly. We're having issues, right? And they're all quirky, out there characters. Yeah. The masochist Ralph really stands out. He's wild and crazy and has all the cheesy one liners. The actor who plays Carmen sat in on some psychiatric evaluation to see how the doctor conducts himself. The actor who plays Ralph went to Cedar Sinai to study people who had like the same mental inflection his character is supposed to have. So they actually did do their homework. The effects for this movie are fucking top notch. One of the first effects you see is when Harris sets fire to all the people in the cult. Whoa, this is 1988 and it looks fucking good. Looks like these people are on fire. Yeah. And it's not awful big fat fire suit. Yeah, John Carpenter fire suit. You see the people's faces and they're in flames. It's really good. The kills. Exactly, which leads us to the kills. Turbine deaths. I guess they kind of want to get a little busy in the woman's room and the guy's like, no, I know a better place. They go to like some boiler room. Turbine room. I like that shot where they're sitting by the turbines. The lights coming through the turbine and they're kind of in the shadows. You don't see them go into the turbine, but you know exactly what's going to happen. Exactly. From the ducks to start spraying blood. So you know what happened, right? Maintenance, man. Yeah. He's all trying to find out what's going on. What the hell? That latch all pops open and all that blood and guts. All the shittles sprays at him. One of the patients murium like jumps out of a window and just falls on the cement. And he's like, I like the quick cut of it. You see your face hitting the cement and his cuts. Ralph is wicked. Starts cutting himself with a scalpel. Yeah, and you can feel it. Anything with a scalpel, you can feel it. Jaws! This movie also has an alternate ending, which is kind of cool to know about, right? Yeah, it's not actually really so much an alternate ending as it is kind of an extended ending, where there was more, there was film that happens after, which is way better than the actual theatrical ending. Like they should have put that in because it ties things up nicely, but also leaves things open for maybe a possible sequel, right? Yeah. It was supposed to be like a franchise. They wanted to get a franchise out of it, but I guess the movie didn't do good enough at the box office, but it still did well. They should have kept going, but on the flip side of that, how? I don't see how they could have done it. So if you haven't seen Bad Dreams and you're fan of 80s horror, man, you have to check it out. It's colorful, and it's fun, and it's smart. So please check out Bad Dreams. And until next time, keep drinking till you pass out and have some bad dreams. That's always when I know I'm going to wake up feeling not bad is when I'm dreaming. Yeah. And I wake up and I'm like, OK, I've sobered up enough where I'm now dreaming, so I won't feel like complete shit. I usually do any worse. Doesn't matter, fuck.