Salvaged from an unsold TV pilot for an untitled horror anthology series for NBC, Nightmares consists of four stories or "chapters" as the film refers to them, of varying degrees of quality.
The first chapter, Terror in Topanga, follows a stressed wife and mother who goes out to get cigarettes while an escaped killer is on the loose. It's based off the old gas station attendant urban legend and will hit all the beats expected, but its competently told if unexceptional.
The second chapter, The Bishop of Battle, follows video game hustler J.J. (Emilio Estevez) as he tries to reach the fabled 13th level of the titular video game, only for said level to be more frightening than he could imagine. It's a fun time capsule showing the 80s video arcade scene and the way it takes the Polybius urban legend and turns it into something that feels like an intverted Tron turned into a horror movie does lead to some fun visuals even if they aren't particularly scary.
The third chapter, The Benediction, follows Frank (Lance Henriksen) a priest who has lost his faith and hits the road abandoning his parish. Once on the road Frank squares off against a jet black pick up truck with tinted windows that is hellbent (quite literally) on killing him. As usual Henriksen delivers a good performance and convincingly portrays a man struggling with his faith. The actual story on the other hand plays like a compressed and sillier version of Steven Spielberg's Duel albeit with a smaller truck and supernatural bent. The short plays itself so over the top in tying itself to Frank's crisis of faith that when the reveal of what the pick up truck is happens I found myself laughing uncontrollably, not only at an over the top symbol telling us, but also an action the truck does that seems like it's "making a wrong turn in Albuquerque". While the short is carried by Henriksen's performance, it undermines itself by going over the top, but its still reasonably entertaining.
The fourth and probably weakest of the chapters, Night of the Rat, follows a family as they're tormented by a giant rat in their home as the father refuses to accept help and insists on handling it himself. Not only is it a repetitive short with the rat bumping objects and messing with the wiring, it's also unpleasant as it lingers on scenes of gross out, mutilated cat corpses, and on more than one instance puts child Brooke (played well by the gone too soon Bridgette Andersen) in mortal danger or situations of distress and terror simply to get cheap knee jerk reactions out of the audience. There's nothing wrong with having children in horror stories face the actual horror, my favorite horror films like The Shining and Something Wicked This Way Comes did that quite well, but here she's not the focus of the movie, the story isn't from her perspective, and there's a genuine nastiness that makes the short a punishing sit. The rat itself is also not that well done as its brought to life with a mixture of unconvincing puppetry and spotty green screen that makes the rat seem like it's floating.
Nightmares as a whole is okay. It's got one good short, two okay shorts, and one bad short. The movie suffers from not having a linking device like other contemporary anthologies of the time like the comic book in Creepshow or General the Cat in Cat's Eye, and while the movie does seem like it's trying to have a "moral" associated with its stories there's no recurring theme passed the first two shorts where characters are ruled by their vices and there's not much cohesion among the film as a whole. With that said I think Nightmares is worth a watch at least once for horror fans if only for curiosity's sake.
