Nightdreams (1981) User Reviews (7)

Really great within its genre.

[Boba_Fett1138 · 8/10 · 18 December 2010]

This is one surreal and beautiful looking and well made porno-flick, that is being quite an interesting and fun watch.

There once was a small, short-lived, wave of porn movies that were made with some more class and ideas behind them, as if it was being a movie within a different and more serious genre. This resulted in some great porn classics, that are still being regarded this present day as some of the best within its genre.

What makes this movie such a great one within its genre is mostly due to the way it looks. It's a real surreal movie that focuses on the erotic dreams of a young woman. Dreams, so that means that not everything really ever makes sense and they are some quite odd, surreal moments in the movie, which are really unforgettable. It also really makes this one original and unique watch, which is also part of the reason why the movie is so fun to watch.

It's also a really well shot movie, with some nice camera-work and professional looking set, costumes and such. It all got directed by a person who didn't had any experience as a director within the porn-circuit and this movie is actually being the only one within the adult genre that he directed. Perhaps this is why this movie is so different from just any other genre attempt and why the movie really is like a breath of fresh air.

A classic within its genre.

8/10

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The ultimate erotic surreal nightmare.

[entrynotfound · 10/10 · 14 March 2004]

Released in 1981, this surreal nightmare was the first and best adult film I ever saw! Ominously creepy, it mixes eroticism with fantasy. Not happy, playful fantasy but disturbed other-worldly phantasmagoria! Dorothy LeMay turns in a fair performance as a mental patient that experiences wild encounters that may be real or may be imagined. Strange themes dominate each scene, from an Uncle Ben box come to life, to an orgy in a middle eastern opium den and all the way to a trip to heaven and hell. My favorite is the girl-girl campfire scene. Danielle turns in one hell of a performance (I believe this was her debut) while a mysterious version of Ring Of Fire plays (Wall Of Voodoo). The director, Rinse Dream (Stephan Sayadian) went on to find fame with Cafe Flesh but this earlier effort is just as imaginative and twice as erotic. Contrary to a previous review, this is hardcore. His only non-porn work, Dr. Caligari, is also excellent but avoid the shot-on video Nightdreams 2 and Nightdreams 3 as well as Party Doll A Go-Go 1 & 2 and Untamed Cowgirls 1 & 2.

Who's the Doctor ? Who's the Patient ?

[Nodriesrespect · 10/10 · 9 May 2008]

No doubt about it, NIGHTDREAMS stands as one of the greatest adult films ever made and a bona fide visionary masterpiece to boot. Prior to winning over the midnight cult crowd with their subsequent CAFE FLESH, the producing and directing team of Stephen Sayadian (a/k/a "Rinse Dream") and Francis Delia (a/k/a "F.X. Pope") all but revolutionized a genre in grave danger of turning stale with this bizarre, cryptic, borderline psycho-analytic (phew !) fable that gave way to a whole slew of inevitably inferior imitations, some of the better examples being Kim Christy's endearingly odd SQUALOR MOTEL and the late Chuck Vincent's SEX CRIMES 2084. While (debatably) more "conventionally" erotic than its follow-up, not to mention its seriously warped '90s shot on video sequels, the original continues to elicit the most disparate responses from whoever comes into contact with it. Be that as it may, love it or loathe it, NIGHTDREAMS remains a movie that's absolutely impossible to forget.

Taking a startling break from playing hormonally charged schoolgirls (think Kirdy Stevens' chart-busting original TABOO and its enjoyably brain-damaged sequel), all time fan favorite Dorothy LeMay caught both friend and foe unaware with her devastating turn as the apparently psychotic Mrs. Van Houten, so named after one of the members of Charles Manson's "family". Doubling as guinea pig for experimenting psychiatrists Jennifer West (formerly "CeCe Malone" on Gary Graver's effective mom 'n' her wayward girls epic TANGERINE) and Andy Nichols (CAFE's indelible Max Melodramatic himself), she's kept in a padded cell, ranting and raving at her unseen jailers whilst masturbating maniacally over a series of imaginative fantasies, ultimately fitting as pieces of a lifeline puzzle from cradle to grave. Childhood innocence acquires a disturbing twist through Dorothy's nursery number with a giant Jack in the Box, but one of several stud performances by the late Kevin James on this occasion, against the unsettling wall of sound created through the use of crazy, squeaky, giggling voices. Fashionable, magazine-touted experimenting with "lifestyles" leads to a threesome with water-pipe-chugging Arab sheiks (in addition to James, Ken Starbuck also performs multiple duties) and the justly celebrated cowgirl campfire roundelay with the awesome Danielle (who would cement her carnal reputation as Joe Sherman's THE GIRL NEXT DOOR) and an actress identified as "Monique" who eventually became Jacqueline Lorians, star of Jerome Bronson's overlooked THE LOVE SCENE.

An unsettling bathroom rape scene liberally borrows visual compositions from Brian De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL, while the witty kitchen sequence supplies co-creator Sayadian with a memorable cameo as a sax-playing slice of Wonder Bread (don't ask !) performing a joyous rendition of the Jerome Kern standard "Old Man River". Appropriately, trips to hell and heaven are up next, the first providing a too brief intervention of fan favorite Loni Sanders as some sort of demon girl eager to please babbling Beëlzebub Starbuck (Ron Jeremy would have been a natural for this part) and the latter - an achingly beautiful pas de deux performed by Dotty and Kev among swirling clouds - superbly scored with Erik Satie's "Gymnopédies". An unnerving final twist back at the lab changes the movie's viewpoint entirely yet makes perfect sense within its skewed internal logic, the (substance-induced ?) brainchild of "Herbert W. Day" a/k/a Jerry Stahl prior to gaining real world respectability with his critically lauded "Permanent Midnight".

In addition to its intellectual properties, NIGHTDREAMS also boasts some of the finest production values ever in porn, starting with Delia's near perfect camera positioning that doesn't just register but actually draws audiences into the fantasist's diseased state of mind, especially when witnessed on a theater screen, as it has been my incredible fortune to experience at what is presumably the last remaining real (i.e. 35mm film projecting) adult cinema in the world, the unsung ABC on the Boulevard Adolphe Max in Brussels. Jimmy Rigg's so stylized it hurts set design adds to the whole mind-bending impression with blatantly artificial, studio-bound decor emphasizing the claustrophobic infinity, the narrative snake eating its own tail structure.

Cult credibility of both this particular film and its insanely talented instigators is further heightened by the soundtrack contribution of indie legend Wall of Voodoo and its immediately recognizable lead singer Stan Ridgeway whose psychedelic version of the Johnny Cash creation "Ring of Fire" proves perfectly suited to the contorting choreography of the cowgirl Sapphic scorcher. Innovative, in part from being the work of comparative industry outsiders, NIGHTDREAMS singlehandedly provided an apotheosis for adult movies just prior to the genre dwindling down to a mere specter of its promising former self as the new medium of video stepped in and took over, illustrating all too eloquently that you really can't go home anymore so you better cherish the memories...

Nocturnal emissions

[Kaliyugaforkix · 26 March 2012]

I've pondered recently what makes the most rewarding time at the movies and it has to be: sitting in front of a screen and being suddenly star struck by the most peculiar yet familiar feeling of unreality. It's like the film itself has tripped the right combination and there I am dreaming wide awake; I'm not real, the room I'm in isn't real and the only thing that matters is the dream in front of me. It's not the feeling of being taken away from my own world into the story's I'm talking about exactly and what most people seem to be referring to when discussing watching films- it's something subtler. It's not the experience of being in a different world it's the experience of dreaming of being in a different world, like the difference between sleepwalking and lucid dreaming.What constitutes the right pattern or configuration to flip the lock and open this trap door in my head I dunno but it's a rare experience just the same (at the movies anyway). When it happens it's something to savor.

Dorothy Lemay comes upon two cowgirls by a campfire. Some lifeless porno talk while a lonely wind blows (this is how silly this stuff actually sounds when you're not horny) then the psychedelic guitars strike and the audience enters hyperspace. The song in this scene is 'Ring of Fire' if it were performed by Martians over hardcore lesbian sex, mocking the original by turning her inside out, hollowing out her guts & reassembling the bones in a jigsaw Rorschach so it only superficially resembles the parent(like the plastic cowboy set). Listen to the exaggerated hillbilly voice the singer uses to belt it out. The whole flick is iffy but here surely there's no way to jerk off here, not unless you're picking up your own deep space signal. Even the performer's sexing is stilted & affected, artificiality being the point; all these layers of unreality reflect back on each other like a TV on TV on a TV- it's a neon waxwork christened in c#m. Every time I hear this song now I nearly enter a fugue state, that menacing electro beat and mid air collision of ambient fender noise- warp speed ahead!

This is the only time a porno has done this to me, that kind of transcendent-grade mind-f%#k. See the whole flick for its bizarre, nightmare visions only incidentally criss-crossed with explicit sex sure; it's one the best XXX films I've seen. See it for the best on- screen use of Satie's Gymnopedie too (wink) but especially see it for this one scene; it's some sort of worm hole lassoed onto camera.

A few years ago I read a novel where this flick figured in the plot. It was about a film editor on an obsessive quest, searching through scads of old movies for a hidden symbol in certain scenes that pointed toward some huge, hidden conspiracy obscured from profane eyes. I wish I could remember the title.

Rapid Eye Movement

[tedg · 25 July 2007]

Some porn from around the late seventies is worth it. "Deep Throat" had at least put money into the system and there were serious expectations that after the sensation wore down, we'd have explicit sex in "ordinary" film as we do in literature and, well, life. My own belief is that the pushback from religious zealots forced sex in films into its own compartment. The result is that harmful stereotypes have been reinforced and we are all worse off.

Anyway, there are a few films that you might find interesting from this suspended era. This isn't quite one. For a film to be a film in my book, it has to have some long form coherence, what folks usually call a story. But it is more than that; its a context, a way to situate the coupling in the world. Porn today is characterized by simple episodes. Context only matters so far as it supports the stereotype being exploited. So for instance if we are supposed to know the guy is a poolcleaner dude, or the woman a schoolgirl, we'll get enough to define that. But only that.

This film is something in between. The "story" has two whitecoated doctors behind a glass wall observing a woman having some sort of erotic hallucinations. The substance of the movie is these episodes of course. All are some sort of ravishing of our subject. The sex is conventional by today's standards but the situations are decidedly not in some cases. There are devils, cowgirls, odd demons, and (get this) Arabs.

The idea is to exploit all sorts of fringe fantasies. Its all pretty hohum, mostly because the cinematic power of what this could be is unexploited. And the actress is a dolt.

But there's one sequence that really is quite spectacular.

Its a well-groomed black man. Not a rough muscular buck, someone that looks like a young rail porter. He is inside a Cream of Wheat box and has sex with our fantasizer while a jazz saxophone player dances around the pair.

Oh, and he's a piece of toast. Its pretty striking both in its cleverness and the completely unique spin on the racial stereotype of the black man, and the implied buckwheat, and cream jokes. Ah, those days, where sex, role and race could be played with in this way.

I think this is not much viewed today. It was never good art nor is it "good" porn by today's standards. But see it for that one scene.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

The sound track

[arty-9 · 20 July 1999]

The best part of this movie was the campfire scene and the use of Wall of Voodoo's cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of fire". And possibly the clown scene was one of the more twisted things I had ever seen at that time in my life(that was until I saw midget porn)

A letdown of immense proportions

[deantje · 7 January 2002]

Was I disappointed when I rented this! The movie seems to be edited by someone taking a scene and cutting ribbons of a few frames each and then pasting them back together to make a "psychedelic looking soft core flick". What I was expecting was the usual artsy stuff that I like from Sayadian (I just LOOOVE "Dr. Caligari") but with some hardcore action. What I got was a flick that just got on my nerves despite the great soundtrack. Where is Sayadian now, anyway?