Dreamaniac (1986)

Cast:

Thomas Bern is Adam
Kim McKamy is Pat
Sylvia Summers is Lily
Brent Black is Doctor
Cynthia Crass is Francis

What the IMDB says:

A heavy-metal musician makes a deal with a satanic succubus to make him successful with women, in return for the succubus being able to feed on the girls.

Plot:

In a dark and stormy night, in the first of many TOO DARK TO SEE scenes, Adam, the main teen character, wakes from a nightmare. Pat, his girlfriend arrives and let the lovin’ ensue. He’s house sitting and rents the place out to his girlfriend’s sister to throw a party to get her invited to join a sorority.

Later, while setting things up, Adam, the heavy metal musician performs some magic ceremony which brings forth a succubus. In another TOO DARK TO SEE scene, the succubus seduces Adam. Later, Adam is getting skittish about having the party at the place.

The party starts up when the sorority chicks and frat guys arrive. Let the Valley Speak ensue so annoying as to drive ears into your ears to end the Fran Drescherion tone with the Moon Zappa dialog.

Since, none of these characters have much of any personality or names. Snobby chick wanders around the house and promptly gets whacked. Others are partaking of other illegal substances.

Lily (Lilith the succubus) pops up at the house. Another TOO DARK TO SEE scene occurs. Lilith attacks another of the sorority members, and the power gets cut.

As the group goes to get the lights back on another sorority member gets de-lifed in another TOO DARK TO SEE scene. Amazingly, the survivors are starting to get the idea that something strange is happening.

Lilith wants Adam to take care of Pat and her sister.

The nerd at the party is convinced that Lilith is a succubus who enslaves guys like Adam. He and Pat plan to kill Lilith and Adam by cutting their heads and staking their hearts. A power drill attack ensues in another TOO DARK TO SEE scene during a chase that removes any ability to tell what’s going on.

Suddenly, a security guard grabs Lilith who apparently escaped from an asylum. Some guy wrote the whole thing as a novel. Opening the door, he’s attacked and bleeds on the manuscript.

What I say:

For years, the lowest rating was the infamous "YUK" rating. And in more than 330 reviews, it had only been used once in what I considered the worst movie I had reviewed: Massacre. That movie is best described as an "in-action" movie. Take 2 episodes of any 1980s action cop show and it would be more exciting. However, Dreamaniac has a bigger problem than "in-action." I cannot think of a movie that needed lighting more than this movie. There's a difference between a movie in a dark house and having a house so dark as to be unable to see anything. Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder could have staged and lit the scenes so they would be easier to see.

The 1980s taught us only some of the dangers of 1980s metal. Whether it is how in Hard Rock Zombies where a metal band is reanimated to stop Hitler or Trick or Treat where the Skippy from Familiy Ties has to stop his metal idol from returning from the dead with cameos by Ozzy and Gene Simmons on the side. Unfortunately, this isn't a movie that could even give us some half-hearted attempts at music humor.

The B-movie fan is like an archeologist without the coolness of Indiana Jones as we try to delve through quite a few bad movies to find some some good ones. That former sentence should be the last usage of the word "good" in this review unless saying there's no 3 hour director's cut of this movie. For the few forgotten films we are amazed by, far more are typically bad enough they should collapse into their own gravity and violotae the laws of space-time by sucking and blowing simultaneously.

The very cheap obligatory "Is it an end or is it?" and ending had officially been run into the ground before this movie. Is it too much to ask for low budget horror movies to not be always ripped off the Deus Ex Machina ending? Most of the movie had the party being wiped out be Adam and Lily. With so many of the infamous "TOO DARK TO SEE" scenes happen, I lost track of what was happening. Suddenly, Lily was an escaped mental patient and the entire story was a manuscript novel. Even with such a pathetic ending as that, the cheap scare had to be done, too.

Dreamaniac has a few reasons why it is NOT considered anywhere as excellent as Night of the Creeps. Characters that have a little depth for B-movies or at least you can tell them apart from others. Is it too much to actually have some idea of the who the characters are? A few vapid characters wander around and get dispatched in a scene that is TOO DARK TO SEE. Out of all the characters, I can only recall the names of 4 characters. The Dreamaniac characters are only slightly more recognizable that those from Cabin Fever which isn't saying much. Another is the director, people can talk about b-movie directors like Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Don Coscarelli, etc...They've had the occasional flops but are pretty talented. Meanwhile, David DeCoteau's big acclaim from the 1980s is Sorority Sisters in the Slime bowl-O-Rama and his current recognition direct to video movies like Leeches that BadMovies.Org have just recently endured.

SideORderOfNinjas Final Thought
Watching C-Span is non-stop action compared to this movie.

Quotable Dialogue
"How'd a cat get in?"
"Why'd you want6 to join a sorority is anybody's guess?"
"Mondo bad planning, Jody."
Morals of the Story
Def Leppard is seriously hardcore metal.
Charades is a hardcore sport.
Touching up one's makeup is more important than life.