Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, 1981.
Directed by Romano Scavolini.
Starring Baird Stafford, Sharon Smith, C.J. Cooke, Danny Ronan, and John L. Watkins.
SYNOPSIS:
A mental patient is released from hospital and goes on a bloody murder spree.
This month sees Severin Films released two very different but equally unpleasant movies on 4K UHD in the UK, and whilst Frank Henenlotter’s Bad Biology would have likely been classed as a video nasty had it originally been released 25 years earlier, it is with Romano Scavolini’s 1981 shocker Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (a.k.a. Nightmares) that Severin dips back into that significant era of British culture with a new presentation of a notorious nasty.
The plot is a pretty simple one, where George (Baird Stafford), a disturbed inmate in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, suffers from grotesque nightmares and flashbacks to his childhood, during which the young George witnessed the brutal murder of his parents while they had sex. Anyway, adult George has been pumped full of drugs and has been ticking all the boxes marked ‘improvement’ so he is released into the community, visits a seedy sex show in a strip club and immediately all of that hard work is unravelled as the psychopath begins to stalk his ex-wife, his children and their babysitter, leading to a violent bloodbath and a final confrontation with his past.
Standard stuff, if truth be told, and although the story has a few small twists and turns, it is quite predictable and not exactly groundbreaking. However, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain does have a reputation for a reason or two, one of them being the relentless bloody carnage that is executed on the screen – shown here in the most complete version ever assembled – which is a novelty because most of the original video nasties were fairly tepid affairs, with only one or two standout scenes of gore.
The second reason is the fact that this is the movie that got distributor David Hamilton-Grant a custodial jail sentence of six months and ensuring the movie moved into cult classic status. This is covered in Damaged: The Very British Obscenity of David Hamilton-Grant, a feature-length documentary included on the Blu-ray disc that will delight and surprise in equal measure. The disc also includes an interview with special effects legend Tom Savini, who is credited on the original poster for Nightmares in a Damaged Brain as ’Special Effects Director’ but here he explains why he wanted his name removed.
As a movie on its own, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain is a scuzzy, sleazy and bloody piece of slasher trash that probably does deserve its reputation to some degree, but don’t go expecting Halloween or Friday the 13th levels of filmmaking as it does suffer with a flabby mid-section, some terrible acting – or stilted line delivery, if you prefer – and a running time that could easily be trimmed by fifteen minutes to add a bit of dynamism. But you don’t go to a movie like this for such things, and the movie certainly delivers when it comes to the kills, mirroring the graphic violence of Bill Lustig’s Maniac, albeit without the character of that movie.
But as a package, Severin have put together a superb collector’s item for video nasty connoisseurs to salivate over, for not only do you get the movie in glorious 4K UHD – which isn’t the greatest print of a movie ever, but it is probably the greatest print we’ll ever get of this movie – and the aforementioned documentary and Tom Savini interview, but there are two cast and crew audio commentaries, an interview with director Romano Scavolini, cast and crew interviews, an 8-page booklet and a slipcase featuring some suitably bizarre artwork.
Nightmares in a Damaged Brain may not be the movie most deserving of such lavish treatment, but Severin have given it to us and physical media collectors’ shelves will be all the better for it, if only to see how far this grubby little horror movie from 1981 that they tried to stop us all from seeing has come in the past four decades.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
