BAD DREAMS
Way too depressing to be much fun
I always thought this was directed by Wes Craven, for some reason. I remember the ads, with a voice-over saying "Jason cut you up. Freddy stuck it to ya. Now meet...Harris." Wow, is "Harris" ever not a scary name. It's written by Steven E. De Souza, who's written a whole lot of really bad crap, and the story's credited to no fewer than four people.
A teenaged girl has last-minute second thoughts about the gasoline baptism her cult is about to take, but she gets herself doused anyway, and barely survives the resulting inferno (this is partially explained in a flashback, but still, she looks a little TOO good for having been trapped in a burning house, soaked in gasoline, with explosions all over the place). After a thirteen-year coma, she comes to in a mental hospital, where she starts having unpleasant visions of Harris, the leader of her old cult. Soon, her whole therapy group starts killing themselves one (or two) at a time.
Jennifer Rubin (who you might remember as the foxy nun in Little Witches and the sexy butch android from Screamers) is very good in the lead role - you just want to reach into the TV and give her a hug. Richard Lynch plays Harris, and does the typical Richard Lynch thing (I don't think I've seen him play a sweet old guy yet - it's been my viewing experience that guys who specialize in playing wackos tend to be really good at playing sweet old men). And Harris Yulin, who plays a doctor, looks just like Lynch, with less hair. What does that tell ya?
There's a scene involving the hospital's ventilation system that might just have you reaching for a barf bag. There are brief, but repeated scenes of the burned face of Harris, which look downright goofy. This movie does have a couple of genuinely intense moments - the flashback to the mass suicide was horrifying, and the climax was pretty good (although it centers on one character being something other than he's claiming to be, and frankly, I just didn't understand it at all).
I dunno, it's all actually pretty depressing overall, but thats suicide for you. Village Of The Damned and Storm Of The Century both had lots of people killing themselves, but really they were murdered by the control of another being - here, the people are already suicidal, and they're just given that little push. It's like the razor-blade scene in Hellraiser II, repeated ad nauseum. And that doesn't seem thrilling, just depressing as hell.
Fans of Lynch should probably give it a look, although he really doesn't do that much here. And maybe you'll get a kick out of it if you're less put off by the tacky way the suicide aspect is handled than I was. Director Andrew Fleming, who Roger Ebert said "is described as a brilliant graduate of the NYU film school" (but apparently found that hard to believe considering the review he gave this movie) went on to do The Craft and Threesome - neither of which met with much more enthusiasm from neither I nor Roger (oh yeah, we're on a first-name basis here).
Closing credits play Guns n' Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine", for some reason.