Dream Demon

 Sometimes a great scene is all you need. British low-budget horror Dream Demon scores one right at the beginning: Diana (Jemma Redgrave) arrives at the altar in a posh-looking wedding, but she's having second thoughts. When she tells her fiancée that she can't proceed, the guy (Mark Greenstreet) gets all stroppy and slaps her. She slaps him back... and his fucking head comes off! A really well made, chunky effect, too, with lots of blood squirting everywhere. Then she runs down the isle, her wedding dress more red than white.

 It's a nightmare, of course. What's interesting is that she doesn't wake up when she kills her husband-to-be, it's after she runs out of church and is accosted by the press. I don't think it really means anything (nothing in this movie does), but it's a fun detail.

 In the waking world the wedding is still some time off, but her anxiety is off the rails. Maybe it's just the wedding, maybe it's something else; Her beau is heavily coded to be a douchebag, and not just because he's a war hero from the Falklands war. Or it could be, as Diana's psychologist not very subtly implies, fear of sex.

 In any case, she's having recurring dreams, none of them pleasant. Things get worse after being accosted by two rude, scenery-chewing paparazzi (played by Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail, who're obviously having a lot of fun). She's rescued from them by a surprise American, Jenny (Kathleen Wilhoite) and they become quick friends. As it turns out, Jenny had come around to get a look at the house she grew up in, though she doesn't have any memories of it.
 The pair bond over... well, mostly Jenny's personality, because honestly Diana is a posh bore, and start hanging out. Over the next couple of days Diana's dreams get worse, and seem to start affecting real life - first one of the paparazzi disappears, then she dreams a bloody earthquake which leaves a very real crack on her wall.

My screencap utility is bugging out with Shudder, so we'll make do with this shitty shot.

 Jenny, intrigued, agrees to try and help. What follows is a very muddled plot where Diana discovers she can pull people into her nightmares, as she did unwittingly to one of the paparazzi. First she does it with Jenny, to try and make sense of what's happening, but later it goes out of control.

 In true dream-logic fashion, nothing really makes sense, and like somebody telling you all about their dreams, it's pretty boring. And because sleep-deprived Diana keeps drifting in and out of dreamland, you never know when something's real or not.

 Without any rules, you can only go along for the ride. There are a couple of recurring images - a guy running around on fire and an angelic girl, mostly, but any resolution is a bit perfunctory and unsatisfying.  The identity of the little girl, for example, is obvious from the get-go, and its revelation comes in one of the most cack-handed bits of exposition I've seen in a long time.

 Mostly, the film consists of empty, surrealist-tinged suspense building heavily indebted to Nightmare on Elm Street and some botched attempts at horror scenes.

 There are some flashes of coolness- a couple neat tracking shots, some neat atmosphere and cool transitions. I still have no idea how they did an effect where someone's ear pops back into existence, that was really well done. Even the script has some glimmers of interest - It sympathises, for example, with Diana's virginal anxiety over sex, to the point where all men who appear here are very much raging dicks of one variety or another. If this got made today people would complain about it being too woke or something.

 But so much of it is incredibly amateurish; The film will often cut to black, and it's so jarring I'm left wondering if the version streaming on Shudder was butchered to allow for TV commercial breaks at some point. The acting is... holy shit it's bad. Jemma Redgrave has become a bit of a stalwart here in the UK, but this is only her second movie and she's terrible in it. Her fiancée doesn't fare a lot better, all ridiculous intensity, badly overselling the obvious fact that he'll reveal himself to be a heel at some point. At least Wilhoite is fine as Jenny (she'd already proved capable of stealing a movie in Witchboard), but there's not a lot she can do with some of her material.

 Technically, as mentioned, it's very uneven, but at least it develops an atmosphere.  As for the genre elements, let's say director Harley Cokeliss (who co-writes along with Christopher Wicking and Catherine de Pury) is clearly not a horror guy, or else he's trying too hard to mimic the tone of the third Nightmare; There's some great bloodshed, though. His biggest movie was Black Moon Rising, and ended up mostly doing TV work after this.

 Dream Demon is cheesy as all hell, often kind of incompetent, but it's got a lot of warmth. It mostly gets by on that and on the strength of its killer first scene. There's no sugarcoating that it's bad, but it's a very watchable kind of bad.