NIGHTMARE WEEKEND – It looks choppy. What's going on? A robbery, maybe? Somebody tells someone else to “rotate the disc”. What's 'the disc'? What does it all mean? Aeroplane. Suddenly, a glove puppet attached to a computer pops up and yells “Danger! Danger!” Then a really unimpressive silver ball trashes the f*ck out of someone's face. Roll credits. Welcome to 'Nightmare Weekend.” It has its own theme tune, with lyrics about a nightmare weekend. It sounds like it was sung by Barbara Dixon.
Anyone who makes it through 'Nightmare Weekend' will find that it does make a bit more sense than the pre-credit scramble suggests. A bit more sense, but not all that much more. There is a plot, sure. It becomes as labyrinthine and as pointless as Robert Altman's softcore version of 'Knots Landing'. I'll try to simplify, but I won't do a very good job. Basically, there's a computer scientist with a massive house, maybe two massive houses (I couldn't tell which was which most of the time) who invites some chicks over to his pad one weekend for some “psychological experiments”. They seem pretty pleased about it when they discuss it during their aerobics class. Maybe I'm wrong, though. Maybe it's the scientist's sinister assistant who gets everyone over. She's involved in some kind of complex subterfuge involving the outcome of all these 'psychological experiments', and seems like the sort of person who wouldn't mind “going above fifty on the Biometer” (which you're strictly not allowed to do in 'Nightmare Weekend'). She certainly doesn't seem to have any qualms about using silver balls to trash people's faces. Those silver balls, by the way, have a lot to answer for. They're obviously ripped off from 'Phantasm', but only to the extent that anyone with a small, unimpressive silver ball with admittedly sinister properties can be said to be ripping off 'Phantasm'. They're at the centre of these 'psychological experiments', and they get in people's mouths, change their victim's personalities, turn them into zombies, that kind of thing. They waver in and out of the film, and tend to be called upon in moments when the filmmakers were obviously thinking “Jeez, how can this scene get any better? I know, we've got these really rad looking silver balls...”. Silver balls aside, we get to focus on the scientist's daughter, who falls for a biker who's in cahoots with the sinister assistant. She turns to the glove-puppet slash computer combo entity for advice on the matter. He tells her she's in love. While she sets about wooing the man of her dreams, we're subjected to various scenes of people shagging in cars with on-lookers bugging out to their walkmen in the background, people shagging on pinball machines in an attempt to intimidate others, and a rape interrupted by one of those silver balls. The list of nonsensical interludes is endless. This is, after all, 'Nightmare Weekend', a derailed cinematic landscape where one man's idea of an insult is to approach another guy in a bar with the words “You're quantity. I'm quality”. 'Nightmare Weekend' is staunchly incoherent. If it has to tell a story, it'll give you fifty of them instead, none of them very good. This is all obviously bad filmmaking rather than an attempt to do anything experimental or 'dream-like', although there are moments which make you question that. Take the scene where one of the girls who've been invited to the house gets it on with a Tom Selleck look alike. She ends up with a silver ball in her mouth and becomes a deranged sex harpy. She straddles Tom and is about to 'strike' in a horror kind of way when the scene cuts away to spider crawling over some croissants and the maid character going “eeek!” No mention ever again of what just happened up there in the bedroom. But, the scene with the spider had obviously been very deliberately set up because it clearly foreshadows something else later on that happens to the maid. It's this weird, weird combination of intricacy and idiocy that makes 'Nightmare Weekend' so special. It's such a head scratch that I can forgive the fact that it's not even very nightmarish until the last ten minutes, when those sliver balls turn everybody into deformed zombies on a death rampage. 'Nightmare Weekend'. What can I say? See it if you like bad, f*cked up weird shit. Don't expect transgression. Don't expect gore, thrills, suspense. Accept that you will be baffled, and perhaps want your money back. For me it's a keeper.
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