Burn Ward of the State
This entry was posted on 10/23/2006 10:21 PM and is filed under Film.
10/24/06: Bad Dreams (1988)Remember those giddy pre-9/11 days when idiots didn’t have to fantasize about our government conspiring to kill children? In other words, remember Waco?
Bad Dreams came out in 1988, but its villain certainly foreshadows David Koresh—and foreshadowed the Clinton administration as an evil force in search of control.
This modest thriller begins with young Cynthia in the commune of charismatic cult leader Franklin Harris. He’s using gasoline to baptize his followers while setting up a big Jonestown-styled barbecue. Cynthia’s a little kid, but she’s not stupid. She’s the only one who tries to escape as the group goes up in flames
Sadly, she only gets far enough to make it into a 13-year coma. More girls should try this, since Cynthia emerges looking like sexy young scream queen Jennifer Rubin. She’s sent into group therapy so she can adjust to a world where The Osmonds are no longer a hit act. It doesn’t take long before Cynthia starts seeing Harris walking the halls of the mental ward. The scorched psycho then starts killing Cynthia’s fellow patients in grisly ways guaranteed to make the pages of
Fangoria.
In a nice twist, Harris isn’t an ersatz Freddy Krueger. An evil psychiatrist has been secretly handing out hallucinogens to the patients in Cynthia’s group therapy. It’s all an earnest experiment in nefarious mind control. Cynthia has just been imagining the charismatic cult leader bogeyman. Her life is really endangered by the authority figure that she’s entrusted with her medical care.
Not many slasher films have dared to take on the scary nanny nation. It gets even better once Cynthia’s love interest figures out the evil plot. Cynthia is in the loony bin and ready to kill herself. The good guy has to free every nutcase in the hospital just to save an innocent soul. We can relate to that. After Waco, we were all for the New Black Panther Party storing up plenty of weaponry.
Make it your own: We learn something new every day.
Bad Dreams is available
on DVD with an audio commentary from writer/director Andrew Fleming, plus an alternate (and inferior) ending. Fleming would also go on to direct one of the best conservative comedies of the ’90s—but that’s another entry.
