Instead of just another Wicked contract girl vehicle, Jonathan Morgan demonstrates his versatility as filmmaker with "Crazed", providing a plum acting role for Serenity and yielding much suspense and even thrills. Morgan returned to the genre years later with an even better hospital thriller "The Gate", starring Alexa.
Well-paced story has Morgan cast as a doctor ready to give Ms. S. a lobotomy, as she's become violent (kept in a padded cell with "No Sleep" self-scrawled all over the walls and her body). He's prevented from doing this by his superior Dr. Weston (billed as being played by "Fazzy"' but in fact the ace writer and NonSex utility actor George Kaplan), who interviews the girl to see if he can help her out of her psychological terrors.
Flashbacks illustrate her tale, married to well-meaning Mickey G., but unable to respond sexually to him anymore. Her BFF Jacklyn Lick gives her a little fetish doll that she calls the "Sleep God", and it has an unfortunate effect on Serenity, the actress's name definitely not applying to her subsequent descent into madness.
In a key role, Mike Horner plays the Sandman, which brought to mind the classic in this genre starring a young & beautiful Virginia Madsen in Clive Barker's "Candyman". Fortunately writer-director Morgan does not imitate but creates his own story with Serenity put through the ringer in sex scenes manipulated by the Sandman, who comes to dominate her in every way.
Her growing fear of letting herself go to sleep (only to suffer the erotic nightmares instigated by Horner) reminded me of my favorite "Twilight Zone" episode I saw as a child, which had a lasting effect on me: "Perchance to Dream" starring Richard Conte as a man deathly afraid to ever fall asleep again.
With bright-red blood injected into the erotic story in a way most timid pornographers are afraid to do, Morgan creates a nightmarish video here, marred only by the now-antiquated (but once upon a time mandatory) tossing in of an elaborate orgy scene, for which the participants are not properly or thoroughly credited in the end "order of appearance" credits crawl. Besides Serenity, Lick gets her licks in and Missy, Johnnie Black (uncredited but spotlighted elsewhere on the DVD menu under "Bios") and Shawna Edwards are hot to trot.
Other sloppiness has the physical DVD issue imprinted "Craze" with the d missing, and a copyright of 1997 not agreeing with the reputed 1999 release date - especially as it is inconceivable that a video this good would have laid on the shelf over at Wicked.
