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.
Charlton Heston is Matthew Cormbeck, a driven archaeologist. (Could an archaeologist played by Charlton Heston by anything other than driven?) In 1961, he discovers the long-lost tomb of an Egyptian queen named Kara. Ignoring both the birth of his daughter and the warning inscribed over the doorway, Matthew enters the tomb and discovers the mummified Kara. At the same time, his stillborn daughter, Margaret, comes back to life.
Alan (Corbin Bernsen) may be a wealthy dentist in Malibu but he still has problems. He has got an IRS agent (Earl Boen) breathing down his neck. His assistant, Jessica (Molly Hagan), has no respect for him. His demanding patients don’t take care of their teeth. His wife (Linda Hoffman) is fucking the pool guy (Michael Stadvec). When Alan feels up a beauty queen while she’s passed out from the nitrous oxide, her manager (Mark “yes, the Hulk” Ruffalo) punches him and then goes to the police. Under pressure from all sides, Alan loses his mind and a crazy dentist with a drill means a lot of missing teeth.
Andrea (Virginia Madsen) is a small town teenager who has just received a scholarship to attend the Ettinger Academy, a formelyr all-male boarding school. Andrea is excited because some of the most powerful and wealthy people in the country have graduated from Ettinger. Her boyfriend (James Wilder) is less excited because he worries that Ettinger is going to change Andrea. He might be right because all of the students at Ettinger are emotionless robots who read the Wall Street Journal and listen to classic music. Even Andrea’s new friends, who all seem normal, soon change into mindless preppies who wear sweaters over their shoulders.
Following the death of her husband, Susan Gordon (Karen Black) relocates to Los Angeles with her teenage daughter, Megan (Rainbow Harvest). An angry goth girl who always wears black and bears a superficial resemblance to Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, Megan struggles to fit in at her new school and quickly attracts the unwanted attention of the school’s main mean girl, Charlene Kane (Charlie Spradling). Fortunately, Megan has an old and haunted mirror in her room that can not only bring her rotting father back to life but which Megan can also use to kill all of her tormentors.
Jeff Mills (Tim Daly) is an attorney who might be unlucky in love but who still owns a copy of every movie that Frank Capra has ever directed. (There is even a scene where two of his friends are seen looking at his movie collection and saying, “He’s got every movie Capra ever made!”) Miranda (Kelly Preston) is the beautiful and mysterious woman who Jeff saves from an abusive boyfriend. Within minutes of meeting her, Jeff invites Miranda to say with him in his apartment. For Jeff, it is love at first sight but his friends (Rick Rossovich and Diana Bellamy) worry that Jeff is getting in over his head with a woman about whom he knows nothing. Weird things start to happen in Jeff’s apartment and a woman (Audra Lindley) shows up in his office, taunting him about how she dug up his mother’s bones and used them in a black magic ceremony. Eventually, Miranda confesses that she is on the run from a Satanic coven that was planning on sacrificing her but is she telling the whole truth?
In 1964, the state of Wyoming executed Charles Forsythe (Viggo Mortensen) for killing another inmate at Creedmore State Prison. Forsythe was innocent of the crime but the only other two people who knew, a prisoner named Cresus (Lincoln Kilpatrick) and a guard named Eaton Sharpe (Lane Smith), kept silent. Twenty-three years later, Cresus is still an inmate and Sharpe has been named the new warden of Creedmore. When a group of prisoner open up the old execution chamber, Forsythe’s electrified spirit escapes into the prison and starts to kill the prisoners and the guards, one-by-one. A convict named Burke (also played by Mortensen) understands what is going on but can he get anyone to believe him?
A year and a half ago, serial killer Ivan Mosser (Lyle Alzado) was sent to the electric chair for murdering 23 people. On the night that he was electrocuted, the worst prison riot in American history broke out. The prison was closed and abandoned. A year and a half later, a film crew has entered the prison to make a women in prison film. Robert Edwards (Anthony Perkins) is the sleazy director. David Harris (Clayton Rohner) is the screenwriter who fights to maintain the integrity of his script and who is an expert on the prison’s history. Susan Malone (Deborah Foreman) is a stuntwoman and David’s girlfriend. And Ivan is the murderer who is still half-alive and full of electricity.
Lou Cherney (Robert Forster) was a top police detective until a perp with a shotgun shattered his leg. Now, Lou’s a private investigator with a limp, a girlfriend (Caren Kaye), and a learning disabled son named Joey (Philip Glasser). When Lou is hired to track down a missing girl, he discovers that she is now the lover of Nicole St. James (Lydie Denier), the head of a modeling agency. Nicole seduces Lou within minutes of meeting him but, when Lou attempts to return the missing girl to her family, Nicole reveals that she is actually an ancient demon and she possesses Joey. Soon, Joey is carrying an ice pick and throwing people out of windows.
Howard Hansen (Ted Prior) is a best-selling horror writer who is suffering from writer’s block. With his agent, Murray (Frank Sivero), pressuring him to get something written, Howard decides to seek inspiration in Chinatown. When he steps into a curio shop and sees a grotesque, one-eyed blob floating in a jar of formaldehyde, Howard buys it. He hopes that the blob will give him an idea for a great book but instead, it just causes him to have nightmares and violent sex with his wife, Peggy (Sandahl Bergman).
Through the Shattered Lens 