Synopsis
Alex is caught in a web of distrust between his brother, his best friend, a beautiful stranger and the renewed dreams of the slaughter of his family.
Deadly Dreams
1988 Directed by Kristine Peterson
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Alternative Titles
Deadly Dreams - todellinen painajainen, Kyklos thanatou, Rêve mortel, La morte viene in sogno
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Very underrated little horror thriller that I thoroughly enjoyed! Everyone talks about how awesome the poster is and I totally agree except I always thought it was supposed to be a rat and apparently it’s a wolf?! Go figure.
The lead actor is hella cute and it certainly doesn’t hurt that he is half naked for most of the movie. Juliette Cummins does a phenomenal job in a role I just didn’t realize she had the chops to pull off. Xander Berkeley plays his usual smarmy self but he’s always hot in roles like that.
I know a lot of people like to say that this isn’t a true horror film because all the horror scenes take place in dream…
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This is a film I've wanted to see for awhile. And it was mostly based on that rad poster art! Look at it! It's great. I was also expecting this to be one of those films where the poster art was the best part. And it kind of is. But I still enjoyed this oddball film.
I was under the impression that this was a slasher but it's more of a weird surreal horror film. And its ultra 80s so its also pretty cheesy. A kid witnesses his father being killed by an intruder with a wolf mask. Now as a teenager he is getting haunting visions and frightening nightmares. As the wolf masked intruder haunts his twisted reality he…
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An interesting little film from Kristine Peterson, who went on to do Critters 3. It's really more of a psychological thriller that borrows some of the trappings of slasher films. It opens almost feeling like a knockoff of something like Silent Night, Deadly Night, with a young boy witnessing his family being slaughtered on Christmas Eve. Then, as we flash forward to the same boy now in college, we are treated to the old vanishing killer standing on the street gag, ripped from Michael Myers' bag of tricks, and a series of nightmares and hallucinations that feel more in Freddy's wheelhouse. And, while it kind of descends into clichéd thriller territory for a bit, the whole thing is somewhat elevated…
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a decently inventive nightmare slasher (that obviously owes debt to Nightmare on Elm St) from Body Chemistry director Kristine Peterson; the deaths are mostly uninspired but the dream logic is weird enough to make it work and there’s a surprising amount of gratuitous nudity and a Christmas angle that I didn’t see coming - at the very least, should be more well known than it is
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Daily Horror Scavenger Hunt 5 – November 2018 Day 6: A movie about dreams or nightmares that isn’t from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. (boxd.it/28ZZ0 )
This has more of a feel of those late 80's/early 90's erotic thrillers than an actual horror film. I kind of thought it would be a slasher, but it's more about a fellow who's parents were murdered in front of him when he was a kid and his nightmare flashbacks to that event in his life. And then the killer comes back...or is he crazy?
I think there were a few too many flashbacks that made this movie feel really repetitive and slowed the movie down to a crawl at times but I…
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I was trying to find Bad Dreams, which is also a 1988 slasher-ish horror with “dreams” in the title and a runtime of approximately 80 minutes, and thought I found it on YouTube, but on closer inspection it turned out to be Deadly Dreams instead, but I said fuck it and watched it because it was on my watchlist anyway. I kind of wish I had watched Bad Dreams instead. Not that this isn’t good, because it’s actually decent enough, but after watching The Slayer earlier, I was in the mood for a better dream-killer movie, and this just wasn’t a good enough substitute for that. It’s more of a psychological thriller, despite some cool nightmare sequences. The wolf mask is pretty cool too.
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Here's a movie you would find in the horror section at your local video store that really isn't a horror movie. I rented this way back in the days when you could rent vhs tapes, and gave up on it because it seem to be a bunch of dream vs. reality nonsense...and upon watching and finishing it 15ish years later, it turns out to be bunch of of dream vs. reality nonsense. But at least now, I can play Vegas style solitaire watching this (I'm up five grand.) As for the plot, prologue child Alex witnesses his parent getting shotgunned by the cover art killer. Now grown up, gaslit Alex has a psychology major best friend who doesn't seem to…
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letterboxd.com/zombifan/list/horrorthon2019/
letterboxd.com/zombifan/list/a-stab-in-the-darkmondo-cinemas-slasher-film/Deadly Dreams...1988
Director...Kristine Peterson (Critters 3)
"Put the fucking gun down!"From the director who gave the world Critters 3 or vanerial disease, which ever one you want to substatute in, comes Deadly Dreams. One thing I can say, is that it certainly lives up to the dream part.
Alex (Mitchel Anderson, Jaws Revenge) witnessed the murder of his parents by a business rival. (They are the lucky ones, out of this movie quick.) As an adult he has nightmares (So many God dammed nightmares.) about a killer in a wolf mask killing his friends. Soon, he starts to see hallucinations of the killer in his daily life.
Is he losing his mind or is the killer real?… -
Oof, talk about a downer ending. I'd say it cries wolf about one time too many, but finishes strong. Not the slasher I thought it was, but more of a whatsit, a thingamajig, yknow, one of those.
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"Tell me that the blood all over my wall is just a dream, alright.... you tell me it's just a fucking dream"
Other than Alex being a kind of annoying lead character, Deadly Dreams has a fair share of great dreamy slasher qualities to it that make it excel in the low budget department.
Doused in a constant cheap hue of misty blues and wavering in and out of blurring the line between reality and deep sleep terror, its wolf masked killer wreaks carnage in a series of bullets, stabbings and slit throats from the world of dreams, hallucinations and beyond. Alex's slow deterioration at the hands of sleep deprivation and constant fear only adds to the anxiety riddled and…
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In the interview with director Kristine Peterson on the new blu-ray, she admits that she spent the entire shoot imagining lead actor Mitchell Anderson with a rifle scope superimposed over his face. She gets it.
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Heads up, this is packaged as a horror movie, maybe a slasher, but it’s more of a psychological thriller.
I recently watched Dogra Magra, a Japanese slow burn where almost every scene could be a dream. That movie was challenging and engaging, while Deadly Dreams felt like someone saying, “Thank goodness it was only a dream!” at the beginning of every scene for a solid 79 minutes. You can get away with that once or twice in a horror movie, but we’re talking dozens of dreams, each one a more obvious cheat than the one before.
Which is too bad, because the performances were convincing, from the poor kid losing his grip on reality to the multitude of betrayals. And…