As week 1 of the 2023 Horrorthon comes to a close, it’s time for me to admit that I am absolutely, 100% exhausted. Hopefully, this latest edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse Trailers will help to keep me awake!
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Here’s a trailer that’s as good as any when it comes to giving you a reason to try to stay awake!
2. Bad Dreams (1988)
Freddy isn’t the only person haunting the dream world.
3. Dreammaniac (1986)
Actually, there’s a lot of dangerous things out there in Dream Land.
4. The Cell (2000)
Even Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn know better than to get lost in someone else’s dream.
5. Phantasm (1979)
And, of course, we can’t talk about sleep and dreams and nightmares without including the classic trailer for Phantasm.
6. Dreamscape (1984)
Fear not, though! If things get too intense in the dreamworld, we can always call Dennis Quaid.
First published in 1994, Bad Dreams is yet another R.L. Stine YA novel about life on Fear Street.
This time, it’s Maggie and her younger sister Andrea who have moved into a new house on Fear Street. Maggie and Andrea are rivals about almost everything. They’re both super competitive swimmers who are fighting for the right to represent their high school at the State Championship. They both like Justin, who is typical boring R.L. Stine boyfriend. They ever argue over who should get the ornate bed in Maggie’s new bedroom. Because Maggie agreed to let Andrea have the bigger room, Maggie gets to keep the bed.
I don’t know, Maggie. You might want to rethink that.
It turns out that the last owner of the bed was actually stabbed to death while laying on top of it. Soon, Maggie is having disturbing dreams where she sees the murder happening. Is Maggie being contacted from beyond the grave or are her dreams warning her that she’s about to become the next victim? And what about all the strange noises coming from the attic?
Soon, Maggie is struggling when it comes to school and swimming because she’s just not getting enough sleep! (This book made me happy that I’ve never needed more than 3 hours of sleep to function.) However, the other two girls who are competing against Maggie and Andrea for a chance to go to State each falls victim to a bizarre accident! Someone is taking out the competition! Is it the ghost? Is it Andrea? Could it even be Maggie herself!?
Will Maggie be able to solve the mystery? Will she eventually get a good night’s sleep and fulfil the promise of having sweet dreams? Will she and Andrea ever be able to put aside their sibling rivalry? And who will go to State!?
And, perhaps most importantly, does anyone really care?
As far as the plot is concerned, Bad Dreams is an example of R.L. Stine on autopilot. All of the questions are eventually answered but the answers seem to come out of nowhere and it’s hard to escape the feeling that Stine pretty much just kept writing until he reached the minimum word requirement and then he decided to quickly wrap things up without really worrying about whether or not he had provided enough clues to keep the reader from feeling as if she had been denied a fair chance to solve the mystery on her own. That said, the first of Maggie’s dreams was nicely creepy and the constant arguing between Maggie and Andrea was kind of entertaining. I’ve got three older sisters so I imagine that every single one of them could probably have related to Maggie at some point while we were all growing up. (It also helped that Andrea and Maggie had red hair, just like me!) Plus, all of the drama around the swim team reminded me of the later episodes of Saved By The Bell: The New Class, in which it suddenly turned out that everyone at Bayside was obsessed with the swim team. Today, books like this are best used for nostalgia and that’s what I definitely felt while reading Bad Dreams.
When she was a young girl, Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin) was a member of Unity Fields, a group of hippies led by the insane Franklin Harris (Richard Lynch). When Harris ordered the cult to join him in a fiery suicide pact, Cynthia was the only one to refuse. While all of the cult members when up in flames, Cynthia ended up spending 13 years in a coma. When she wakes up, she has no memory of the incident and finds herself as a patient in a psych ward. She has a support group to provide therapy. She has two doctors (Bruce Abbott and Harris Yulin) watching her every move. And she still has nightmares and visions of the long-dead Harris, appearing around the hospital, sometimes burned and sometimes not. When the members of her therapy group start to die, Cynthia is convinced that Harris has returned to claim her.
A year before starring in Bad Dreams, Jennifer Rubin made her film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. That seems appropriate because Bad Dreams would never have existed if not for A Nightmare on Elm Street. Franklin Harris is only a few bad jokes and a razor blade glove away from being Freddy Krueger’s older brother. However, if you can see past the movie’s derivative nature, Bad Dreams is not bad. Some of the deaths are inventive and Jennifer Rubin shows why she should have become a bigger star than she did. Though Franklin Harris may have been developed as stand-in for Freddy, Richard Lynch is memorably menacing and makes the role his own. Bad Dreams may have been a clone of another film but not all clones are bad.
On June 20th, it was announced that the body of veteran character actor Richard Lynch had been found at his home. Richard Lynch was never a household name but, if you’re a fan of exploitation and grindhouse cinema, you’ve probably seen him at least a few times. He was the tall, blonde actor with the scarred face who was alway either killing people or having them killed. Richard Lynch was one of those actors who, as soon as he showed up on-screen, you knew he was the bad guy.
As an actor, Lynch always brought something special to even the simplest of his roles. He was always the villain who you knew would probably easily kill the hero if the two of them ever met in the real world. He was so good at being bad that you often couldn’t help but root for him.
I first became aware of Richard Lynch when I bought a movie called Premonition on DVD. This atmospheric 1976 film featured Richard Lynch in the role of a villainous yet oddly sympathetic carnival clown-turned-kidnapper. When Lynch was on-screen, I literally could not look away. Even better, the DVD included an interview with the now white-haired Richard Lynch in which he discussed his career. Imagine my surprise to discover that this rather creepy and scary-looking actor was actually a very articulate and witty man.
A few days after I saw Premonition, I watched another 1976 film on DVD. This one was Larry Cohen’s Gold Told Me To and, to my surprise, it also featured Richard Lynch. This time, he was cast as an alien messiah who inspired all sorts of mayhem in New York City. From that moment on, Richard Lynch was one of my favorite of the old exploitation actors.
After Richard Lynch’s body was found, there were several news stories that mentioned his passing. Almost all of those stories repeated the story that Lynch’s distinctive facial scars were the result of him setting himself on fire as the result of bad LSD trip in 1967. A few mentioned that he was a longtime friend of Al Pacino’s. Most of them took a rather dismissive attitude towards the majority of Lynch’s films.
In fact, it seemed like the only place that Richard Lynch got the proper amount of respect was on twitter. And that’s a shame because an actor like Richard Lynch deserved a lot more.
The sad thing is that actors like Richard Lynch are rarely appreciated because elitist (and wannabe elitist) filmgoers and critics are rarely willing to admit that it does take a certain amount of talent to be an effective and memorable villain. As an actor, Richard Lynch appeared in some good films and he also appeared in a lot of very bad films but he always gave a good performance. Unlike so many other actors, he never used subpar material as an excuse to give a subpar performance. Regardless of the films he found himself in, he always gave it his best and that’s why this super-sized edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers is dedicated to Richard Lynch.
1) God Told Me To (1976)
Arguably, this film from director Larry Cohen was the best movie that Richard Lynch ever appeared in. Though he doesn’t get a lot of screen time in either the film or the trailer, he easily dominates both, if just for the fact that Lynch plays the God of the title.
2) Deathsport (1978)
Richard Lynch vs. David Carradine.
3) The Sword and The Sorcerer (1982)
Though I haven’t seen it, this film is a favorite of many of my fellow contributors here at the Shattered Lens.
4) Cut and Run (1985)
This film was directed by Ruggero Deodato and apparently, it gained a certain amount of fame after it was banned in several countries. I’ve seen it on DVD and all I can say is that this is one of the most misleading trailers ever made. However, this film also features one of Richard Lynch’s most intimidating performances.
5) Savage Dawn (1985)
For some reason, I doubt that the character being played by Richard Lynch is a real priest.
6) Invasion USA (1985)
Judging from the response to Richard Lynch’s death on twitter, this Chuck Norris movie might be the film that he’s best known for.
7) The Barbarians (1987)
This film, which appears to feature Richard Lynch in full villain mode, was also directed by Ruggero Deodato.
8) Bad Dreams (1988)
Richard Lynch is all sorts of creepy in this trailer. Knowing about his own true life story makes this trailer all the more odd to watch.
9) Trancers 2 (1992)
Helen Hunt’s in this?
10) Werewolf (1996)
Thisone looks like fun, to be honest.
11) Wedding Slashers (2006)
“Til death do us part…”
12) Mil Mascaras Vs. The Aztec Mummy (2006)
Finally, let’s finish things up with the trailer for this Mexican film in which Richard Lynch was cast as the President of the United States.
When she was a young girl, Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin) was a member of Unity Fields, a group of hippies led by the insane Franklin Harris (Richard Lynch). When Harris ordered the cult to join him in a fiery suicide pact, Cynthia was the only one to refuse. While all of the cult members when up in flames, Cynthia ended up spending 13 years in a coma. When she wakes up, she has no memory of the incident and finds herself as a patient in a psych ward. She has a support group to provide therapy. She has two doctors (Bruce Abbott and Harris Yulin) watching her every move. And she still has nightmares and visions of the long-dead Harris, appearing around the hospital, sometimes burned and sometimes not. When the members of her therapy group start to die, Cynthia is convinced that Harris has returned to claim her.
Through the Shattered Lens 