Thursday, May 18, 2017

The Overlook Theatre Reviews: Dream Stalker

6 of 7 viewers "Liked" "Dream Stalker" (1991, USA)
Here's what the creatures had to say:

Huntress - "I guess I could have gone without ever seeing Dream Stalker and not knowing what I missed out on, but now that I know about this strange early 90's creation, there's no going back. Even though the inspirations for this film are no secret, where the story goes is anything but predictable. There's a pretty hefty cast of characters, some seriously impressive special effects, and a villain I won't forget anytime soon. Thank you, Intervision, for adding this crazy, barely audible but luckily subtitled, film to our libraries!" - 4.5 Stars

Dabbles - "Must watch with captions. There are a lot of things going with this movie. So campy, so awkward, but fun. The music helped the movie, and the production is all well done." - 4 Stars

The Great Hornito - "One of the best micro budget horror movies I've ever seen. It had a great stalker with a great name "Ricky Fries". It had a great awkward soundtrack. Really creepy and silly special effects. The kills were excellent and to top it off it had very long and very awkward sex scenes that felt almost like porn." - 4 Stars

Lord Battle - "Dream Stalker is a rare micro budget horror that is both competently made and lacks any "sleepy" stretches. What it does have is good to shocking special effects, random rapers roaming the woods, and a corpse complaining about his tombstone, Dream Stalker rules!" - 5 Stars

Math Mage - "I kept waiting for Zordon to summon them to fight Rita, but then ghost rape! Our villain (who like Tommy Wiseau wished to be handsome with a cut rate genie [before being a zombie]) is alternately reasonable​ ("make my grave better!") and randomly murderous (there was no reason to kill all those campers much less hang them from a tree)." - 2.5 Stars

Clark Little - "Weird. Cheap. Hilarious. Gruesome. No, these are not the Yelp reviews for my Match.com profile. These are all the reasons why this movie was rediscovered and put on DVD. If you're into low budget horror, this is one you need." - 4 Stars

Trash - "I crept into the theater as quietly as I could, the movie had already begun. To get to my seat I crossed directly in front of the projector, blocking the entirety of it for a moment. I didn't know how late I was, but I didn't want to disturb the group, already engrossed in the feature. "HOW LONG AGO DID THIS START?" I screamed. The answers rolled back in a wave, "Like five minutes!" "Half an hour!" "It's almost over!" What was this?! No one had any idea how long Dream Stalker had been on, they were all in a trance! Soon I gathered a complex plot had set the crazy, very bloody murders I was watching into motion. Eyeballs everywhere! Several of the theatergoers tried to explain it to me later. Whatever the hell was going on, what I saw of it ruled. Micro budget craziness, the characters were from Sacramento, there was a dead murder biker being summoned by either dreams or a music box, and there was some sick jazz music whenever anyone got intimate. I highly recommend this movie, and one day, I'll watch the first 5 minutes / half hour / entire movie, and I'll fucking love it even more. FOUR STARS!" - 4 Stars (default 0)



The Overlook Theatre Final Rating*
(Below is for after you've seen the film)

Time is relative. This always seems most apparent in the worst ways, like when going through a break-up or  when a close friend of family member dies. Time just seems to drag on but before you know it you're looking back on what seems like forever to mourn. I'm talking about the "bad times" because that's where Dream Stalker starts. Well to be fair, it starts at the best times with a motocross race, a marriage engagement, and a photoshoot in New York but quickly unravels after an off camera moto accident. By the time we learn of Ricky Fries fate, the film has already slipped into a surreal storytelling device. See it's my belief that Dream Stalker purposely plays with time in order to better illustrate what Kitty's going through. We first learn something has happened to Ricky while onboard a plane. The reason this is important is because it's a return flight back from New York. This is a jarring discovery since we never saw Kitty leave and are told in a off hand kinda way that a chunk of time has passed. Once Kitty returns to Sacramento these time lapses only get worse and are accented by her lucid dreams of a now deceased​ Ricky Fries. Before the film is through we will have time jumped 3 years into the future, while as an audience we remained trapped in the past remembering the motor cross event, marriage engagement, and New York photoshoot like it was just yesterday. Now it's completely fair to say that this experience is a product of amateur film making but I'd like to counter with the fact that film is both reflection and expression of a collaborative effort. And when a micro budget film like Dream Stalker is rediscovered years after it disappeared, watching the film then becomes a collaborative reflection of the audience and cool high-brow theories can then permeate, no matter how absurd.

You can pick up your own copy of Dream Stalker here!

-Lord Battle

The Overlook Theatre materialized in a residence for a screening on 5/11/2017
*Based on the star ratings turned in by character reviewers, others viewed and got to "Dislike" or "Like" but that does not affect the rating.

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