Was Nightmare Woman Taken?

Title:  Nightmare Man

Actors/Director/Anything Worth Mentioning Right Away:  Nightmare Man is part of the 2008 “8 Films To Die For” series presented by After Dark Horrorfest.   It neither stars nor is directed/written by anyone of much note.

Introduction:  I bought this DVD at Walgreens for four dollars strictly because it was part of the 8 Films To Die For series.

Location:  This movie takes place during a car ride and then in a cabin and the woods surrounding a cabin.  Not too high of a budget for location at all, since they really just had to rent a house (or use one for free from a generous friend).

Plot:  This movie has the classic two part plot, where Plot A meets Plot B and thrusts a great deal of mayhem and chaos whilst doing such.   The beginning of the movie focuses on a character (played by Blythe Metz) who believes to have the Nightmare Man inside of her, so her husband is taking her to be committed.   (Awww, how sweet)  On the way there, the car battery dies and this woman is stalked by the Nightmare Man until she runs through the woods and finds a cabin which is playing party to, you guessed it, a bunch of drunken/stupid college aged kids.   There are two couples (two guys, two girls) and although the two girls seem to have a “college experimental type” history together, one of the girls is engaged to one of the guys.  This is only worth noting because when his fiancé dies, the guy stands up and vows to avenge her death.  However, halfway through his little speech, he himself is shot with an arrow and dies.   Did I mention that the main weapons in this movie are guns and a crossbow?  Kind of weak on the special effects, but more on that later.   So this woman wreaks havoc on these kids, and it’s really just a matter of wrong place/wrong time for them.   I mean, sure, they’re stupid, but the only reason why they start getting picked off one by one is because this crazy lady just happened to show up in their woods.   Then this movie takes its first twist, as it is shown that the husband was behind the attempted murder of his wife all along and she is not really crazy.   Whew!  That makes sense.   But wait, there’s more!   Said crazy lady then turns into the Nightmare Man (growing horns and colorful face paint), revealing that she wasn’t crazy all along.    It’s kind of cliché as far as plots go (it’s not the most original idea ever), but there are enough twists and turns for it to stand as a good movie premise. 

Acting:  The acting in this is actually fairly decent.  No one that I can tell has been in anything else worth noting, but these kids do pull it off quite well.   The ladies- especially the two who have the Nightmare Man inside of them- do the best job and I’d look for them to make mainstream horror movies if I was making them.

Production:  It looks like a movie you’d go see in theaters.   It probably had a budget.

Sex/Nudity:  There is a small amount of nudity (mostly just boobs) and some innuendo and talk of sex, but no real full on sex scenes, thank goodness.  They start playing truth or dare, but are quickly interrupted before the girl even takes her shirt off, so yeah, it’s got boobs and that’s about it.

Special Effects:  There is however one scene where the girl shows her boyfriend her butt.  As she lifts up her skirt and sticks her head through her legs, she doesn’t notice until it’s too late that her boyfriend eats an arrow.  This is the defining moment in the special effects of this all- some stupid kid attached to a tree courtesy of an arrow.   It’s a sight worth seeing, if only for that, as the rest of the effects were about what you would expect them to be with arrows shot in various areas (but nothing too violent) and guns.

Overall Verdict:  I actually really liked this movie.  As far as horror movies go, it wasn’t very scary and it didn’t really leave me wanting the kids to survive (or the crazy lady—or anyone for that matter), but it got the job done of watching them all get picked off one by one until the end, and until a new Nightmare Man was born.  They’d probably totally Cabin Fever a sequel to this movie, but for what it was, the plot was good, and so was the production value and acting.   You should see it.