Monday, May 31, 2010

PARASOMNIA (a review)


By the director of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL...is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing? But it does have Jeffrey Combs, most famous for his roles in the cult classics RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, so I gave it a look.

The story? While visiting a friend in drug rehab, a guy wanders into the psych ward where he meets a girl who sleeps most of the time (parasomnia). He falls in love with her and decides to kidnap her. She has never been in a car or seen ice cream (although she can talk). Unfortunately, one of the other people in the psych ward was a serial killer who had great powers of hypnotism and who visits her in her dreams and takes over her body, causing the girl to kill a bunch of people. Now the guy is on the run and the girl's body is recovered by the cops and put back into the psych ward. The guy goes to break her out, but instead the serial killer escapes and takes the girl. The serial killer then takes control of a detective (over the phone) who brings the guy to the serial killer. The killer has to not just kill the boy, but to erase him from the girl's mind so she will fall in love with him. But instead they are able to defeat the killer and blah blah blah

So was it good?

Well, from the description you can guess that the movie is a bit of a mess. The first half feels more like a comedy with the guy falling in love with sleeping girl and then her being scared of driving and fascinated by ice cream. It isn't until the middle of the film that things get going when the serial killer takes over and she starts to kill people -- a lot of people -- but it's still kind of funny with the guy trying to cover up. Now maybe it's me, but if the girl I loved started killing people (she attacks him too) I would probably find another girl.

Still, there is some cool stuff in here. The dream sequences were well done -- visually cool and strange. And at the end in the killer's lair there's more weird cool stuff. Some of the other stuff is cool -- the killer hypnotizing or invading dreams could be okay but all together with the girl waking up and all...it's all kind of a mess.

I will give them some credit...it's a fun kind of mess. Maybe if they had centered the movie more, made it more focused on the killer reaching out to get ahold of other people to get out...I don't know. There's some cool stuff here and some fun stuff and it would have been great if they could have pulled it all together a bit more.

*** NOT RECOMMENDED (but kind of a fun mess) ***

No comments:

Post a Comment