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Released by: Vinegar Syndrome
Released on: September 22nd, 2015.
Director: Henri Sala
Cast: Debbie Laster, Dale Midkiff, Debra Hunter
Year: 1986
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The Movie:
Henri Sala is (Was? Is he dead? He's probably dead) a French filmmaker who was quite prolific in the European sex film industry of the seventies and the eighties. He made Emanuelle And Lolita and more than once he directed Karine Gambier and Brigitte Lahaie. This, of course, made him the perfect choice for a movie to be shot in Florida dealing with the popular eighties theme of the horrors of computer technology, and judging by the results - he was!
The 'story' begins when a propeller plane moves slowly through the deep dark night towards some parked motorcycles. The propeller on the plane stops. It doesn't wind down, no, it just isn't moving once we cut to the next shot. The guys in the plane get out, and proving that they take safety seriously, they've already got their helmets on when we see them. This keeps them mysterious. One of the men uses a CB radio to tell someone named Julie that they've landed. From there, Julie accesses a computer and on the screen we see the word DANGER start to flash. Next to that computer is a fucking green puppet with a heart where his mouth should be. This puppet has a tendency to mimic whatever appears on the screen of the computer - THIS IS WHERE WE ARE HEADED! THIS IS WHERE TECHNOLOGY WILL TAKE US!
Sheer terror.
From there, the biker guys go into a building and then connect a black box to another thing. While this is happening, the computer monitor flashes GEORGE ONLINE WITH APACHE. After this happens a silver ball appears on the roof and kills one of the guys.
From there we meet a pretty college girl named Jessica Brake (Debra Hunter), the daughter of a computer scientist named Edward Brake (Wellington Meffert - best name ever?). She takes off from the campus and heads… somewhere. Meanwhile, Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster) - the Julie who radioed with the guys on the motorcycles - has set up some sort of experiment involving computers. At a nearby bar, a limo driver is told by Julie to go get some people. Jessica, meanwhile, heads home to meet her dad and it's is THEN that we learn the connection: Julie is Edward's assistant and as such, she has access to all of his high technology experimental equipment and puppets. Jessica heads to her room, puts on lingerie and tells the puppet/computer/George thing how much she likes it. Then she uses Edward's computer to remotely control Julie's maroon colored Buick and subsequently drives them into a pole. Now, if you were around and playing video games in the eighties you might remember Colecovision and if you remember Colecovision you might remember a really primitive racing game called Turbo. That's basically the software that is used to pull this off.
Later, the limo driver picks up a trio of hotties at the same bar we saw earlier. Julie is going to do some sort of experiments on these women (one of whom is Andrea Thompson, the same Andrea Thompson who would later work on camera for CNN). Jessica, meanwhile, is getting all hot and heavy with a biker named Ken (Dale Midkiff). A guy with a walkman dances. Julie winds up roller-skating over to the bar and sees a dude banging a chick on top of a pinball machine. The three hot human guinea pigs wind up back at the house that everyone seems to live at and wear awesome trashy eighties lingerie and shower a lot. Later a man is killed by a pair of women's underwear and that weird silver ball thing shows up again. Jessica looks like she wants to kiss a tarantula for some reason and the true evil nature of Julie's unauthorized experiments are…. Never properly explained, actually.
This movie doesn't make a damn lick of sense but it's opening theme song, Nightmare Fantasy, is powerful enough to draw blood. Where the film tries to provide a terrifying glimpse of a horrifying future we've yet to truly evade with its use of computer technology and….hand puppets, it instead posits that maybe we're all better off banging each other on the pinball machine. And it's hard to argue with that. It really does seem like the right thing to do when you exist in a world more concerned with gratuitous aerobics and random dollops of surprisingly strong gore than with logic of any sort. It's as if everyone involved with this production at one point collectively threw up their hands and said 'Fuck it! This script makes no sense, we're in Florida, no one knows what they're doing here - let's just shoot some people fucking on a pinball machine, throw in a hand puppet and be done with it!'
Leave it to Troma to pick this one up, give it a home video release and leave it to find its own cult following. It's interesting to see Dale Midkiff from Pet Semetary pop up here but it's more interesting to see the ladies get naked. And they do. A lot. It's more interesting to see the hand puppets and the death by underwear too. Midkiff is interesting but he's not that interesting. It's a horrible, horrible film, a total disaster in every way possible - but if, like so many of us, you're tired of slasher movies and zombies films and want your horror films with a little something extra, something that hasn't been done to death over and over again, this has it. What exactly that 'it' is, well, that's very debatable but Nightmare Weekend is absolutely a film like no other. Put it on your shelf next to Night Train To Terror to make your life complete.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Vinegar Syndrome presents Nightmare Weekend in a new restored transfer taken from a new 2k scan of the 35mm internegative. This is a pretty grainy looking movie but not in a bad way, it just looks true to source. Detail is pretty solid here and colors look really good. Black levels are also pretty solid while skin tones look nice and natural. There is some minor print damage here and there, you'll spot the occasional nick and the occasional scratch, but for the most part his is a solid transfer and it offers up a pretty massive upgrade compared to the old DVD release.
The DTS-HD Mono sound mix, the only option on the disc, also fares well. The opening theme song has good clarity and the goofy music used throughout the film is also appropriately bouncy. The weird computer effects noises and the screwy puppet voice will haunt your dreams, while the dialogue is easy enough to understand. English SDH subtitles
There are two main extras here, the first of which is a twenty-three minute long featurette entitled Thank God It's Monday, which interviews Dean Gates. The second featurette, the thirteen minute Killer Weekend, interviews Marc Gottlieb. What's interesting here is not so much where they differ but what they have in common. Both men share very similar stories about the director and the French crew, the script or lack of script, the effects work, and more. They also both wound up appearing in the movie as the gas station attendants.
The disc also includes the softer alternate R rated edits that were used for the trimmed version of the movie, the original theatrical trailer, menus and chapter selection. As this is a combo pack, you also get a DVD version of the movie with identical supplements included in the Blu-ray case. It's also worth mentioning that the cover insert artwork is reversible - always a nice touch.
The Final Word:
You might not have though you needed an uncut special edition Blu-ray release of Nightmare Weekend, but the fact is you do. It might not make any sense and it might not be any good but it sure is a unique film, the kind that could only have come out of the eighties. The very fact that this Blu-ray exists is reason enough to rejoice, but hey, take into account the quality of the presentation and the fact that it's got a few solid extras too? BLISS!
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
