GRINDHOUSE NIGHTMARES (2017)

(Director/screenwriter: Richard Driscoll.)

Note: NIGHTMARES, a direct-to-video double-bill anthology film with retitled trailers, was released in longer form the previous year as GRINDHOUSE 2WO (2016), also directed by Richard Driscoll (NIGHTMARES, at an hour and fifteen minutes, is eleven minutes shorter than 2WO).

Also: Tubi streaming service, on which I watched NIGHTMARES, lists it with a TV-14 rating, but given the subject matter and the amount of female nudity in it, an R rating is more appropriate.

 

Review

NIGHTMARES’s exploitation-minded ambition matches that of its 2007 cinematic inspiration, GRINDHOUSE. Unfortunately, NIGHTMARE’s screenplay─penned by director Driscoll─is a wildly uneven work.

The wraparound story centers around a blood-spattered, face-painted nurse (Linnea Quigley, also seen as a Nazi elsewhere in the film)─her character comes off as a (more) hyperactive, lower budget version of Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) in HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (2003). Quigley tries her best to make her lines entertaining but sometimes even a great B-movie actress can’t save groan-worthy dialogue.

 

Scratchy film stock, varying film quality, smash cuts, and swarming, man-hungry rats can’t save “Manhunt,” an overlong, blatant SAW (2004) rip-off whose “twists” are explicitly boosted from the much better milestone film. “Manhunt”’s long-overdue ending falls flat.

 

The between-mini-features “Prevues of Coming Attractions” are mostly fun. The better ones include: a charming bird-and-car-related cartoon for Doomsday Insurance; scenes of Bill Moseley (as Lemmas) in a TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) knock-off, TEXAS CHAINSAW HILLBILLIES; archive footage from NIGHTMARES director Richard Driscoll’s EL DORADO (2012)─this prevue is retitled ASSKICKER, featuring Michael Madsen as a tough guy and Patrick Bergin as the main villain; and the full of machine guns and hot nude women flick NAZI BITCHES MUST DIE.

“Stripper with a Shotgun,” the second half of the double bill, has strippers, nuns, gun play, Brigitte Nielsen, a cool yellow Trans-Am, and kung-fu fights in a fake-looking wrecking yard background. In it, with its own meta-wraparound story, a stripper-nun is interrogated by a cop about the events that led to their situation. “Stripper” is far superior to “Manhunt” on all levels, with intentionally laugh-out-loud, era-true cinematic clichés.

Is NIGHTMARES worth watching? Yes, if you fast-forward past “Manhunt,” enjoy Linnea Quigley (even in her lesser movies) and enjoy largely spot-on fake trailers (some of which feature footage from differently titled movies). Otherwise, you might want to skip this one. I haven’t seen the longer version of NIGHTMARES, GRINDHOUSE 2WO, so I can’t compare the two works.