Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, it’s all about dreams!

Episode 2.16 “Perchance to Dream”

(Dir by Paul Boyington, originally aired on February 4th, 1990)

Alex (Raphael Sbarge) is a college student whose dorm room has become one wild place.  Blood continually drips from a chair.  A subway train occasionally roars past the window.  A giant nun peeks in on him and tries to swat him with a ruler.  These are all images that Alex used to see in his dreams but now, they’re entering his waking world and what’s really strange is that everyone else can see them too.  His subconscious has become reality.

Thinking that it might have something to do with a recent mugging in which Alex struck his head and apparently lost the ability to sleep, Alex’s girlfriend, Megan (Sarah Buxton), asks Kyle (Kenneth Danziger), an expert on dreams, for help.  Arriving at Alex’s dorm room just in time to save Alex from the nun and her ruler, Kyle theorizes that, because Alex isn’t sleeping, he’s projecting his dreams into the real world.  The only solution is for Alex and Megan to enter a portal that leads them straight into Alex’s subconscious.  If Alex can find his dream self, he can finally get some rest.  Of course, Alex and Megan will have to avoid and defeat a series of trains, muggers, and nuns to accomplish their task.

This episode is entertainingly goofy.  It was obviously inspired by the popularity of the Nightmare on Elm Street films but the monster here is not a wisecracking killer like Freddy Krueger but instead, it’s just Alex’s bad childhood memories and the trauma of having been mugged.  As I watched this episode, I was impressed that Monsters tried to do something different than usual but I was also very aware that 20 minutes was not enough time to tell the story that this episode wanted to tell.  For this episode to really work, the viewer would have to feel a deep connection to Alex.  Raphael Sbarge gives a likable performance as Alex and he has a really cute chemistry with Sarah Buxton but 20 minutes still isn’t enough time to really get to know the guy.

When seen today, the special effects are undeniably primitive but there’s something kind of charming about that.  The scene where the giant nun tries to swat Alex with a ruler looks silly today and I imagine it probably looked silly in 1990 as well but it’s a fun kind of silly.  The same can be said of the scene where Alex and Megan plunge into his subconscious.  CGI has come a long way but today’s realistic CGI just doesn’t have the do-it-yourself charm of early chroma keying and matte shots.  I liked that Alex’s subconscious was not only goofy but cheap as well.