The Romano Scavolini directed Nightmare was released at a time in the early 80s when slasher movies were the flavour of the day with horror fans and infamous in terms of UK home video censorship.
Nightmare is the story of George Tatum(Baird Stafford) an inmate at a hospital for the criminally insane is placed into an experimental drug programme and is released back into the community when he’s showing progress with this treatment. But the repressed memories of a sex murder sets off George, and he travels to Florida with murderous intentions towards a family that he may have connections.
Nightmare begins with some excellent location footage of at the time of production New York & the infamous 42nd street as George walks past various sex shops and movie theatres playing the likes of Fade To Black & Caligula alongside some Sonny Chiba Kung Fu classics with the rest of the movie taking place mostly in Florida.
The movie directed Romano Scavolini brings an Italian flavour to the American Exploitation horror film in terms of creating tension fuelled scares crossed with some effectively gory special effects sequences that on the promotional materials are incorrectly credited to Tom Savini when in fact he only came for a set visit during the infamous axe swinging scene and offered advice to the FX crew.
When it comes to the lead, Baird Stafford gives a committed performance with his freak out moments where he foams at the mouth or is being creepy while wearing a Columbo trench coat staring at the mopped haired kid.
The supporting cast are fine, mostly made up production crew on double duties;I did enjoy Sharon Smith as the single mother who is trying to enjoy her dating life with a Tommy Chong look alike while juggling three kids, one of them who is challenging let’s say and leads to some good mom rage moments from her.
Nightmares In A Damaged Brain arrives in the UK on a special edition 4K & Blu Ray uncut with over five hours of supplemental extras. There are two commentaries, one from producer William Powell & another with the leading actor and Special Effects Assistant Cleve Hall. This is the most engaging of the two chat tracks.
The disc contains the original trailers,a stills gallery that has the British press materials that caused a major stink and some amazing international VHS covers alongside some deleted scenes sourced from Dutch & Australian video editions of the movie.
It’s when we come to the interviews which include a 70 minute discussion with the film’s director, a small featurette with horror effects legend Tom Savini talking about his “involvement” with this film and a 40 minute documentary with the cast, crew and the US distributor of Nightmares 21st century’s Arthur Schweitzer which would be later taken over by the former Cannon Films Mogul Menahem Golan.
But what makes this an essential purchase for film fans is the feature length documentary Damaged on British Film Distributor David Hamilton Grant or Willis Andrew Holt while began his career as photographer and went onto produce a film with Spike Milligan about the Scottish Poet William McGonnagall & direct various low rent 70’s sex comedies starring the likes of Coronation Street actor Johnny Briggs it was a time when British cinema audiences attended them in droves but the genre sputtered out by the end of the decade.
It was in the late 70s he delved into the burgeoning VHS market at the time when the major companies had little or no involvement within this new technology that was becoming highly lucrative and weren’t under the cosh of the British Board Of Film Censors so Hamilton Grant would buy the distribution rights cheap of movies that would in future be labelled as Video Nasties films by Moral Watchdogs because they contained at the time some extreme violence which look extremely tame viewed through modern eyes.
World Of Video 2000 was set up in 1978 funded by several investors and in that time distributed the Wes Craven Classic The Hills Have Eyes,Don’t Answer The Phone,The Killing Hour,Human Experiments, Cliff Twemlow’s GBH,ET knockoff ETN and Nightmare which Hamilton Grant retitled Nightmares In A Damaged Brain which ultimately landed the movie mogul an 18 month prison sentence on obscenity charges all because of 48 second’s of uncut footage and the end of his film career in 1984.
It’s a fascinating documentary with contributions from those who worked with him,journalists, and academics talking about this now mysterious figure narrated by Pirates Of The Caribbean actor Jack Davenport.
Nightmares In A Damaged Brain Available on 4K and Blu Ray from 26th February
The Film Collective Scotland 
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