Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Nightmare Cinema Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 27, 2019

If you were walking around your town in the, um, Dead of Night, in an area that looked like “the wrong side of the tracks”, with nary another living, breathing soul in evidence, and you suddenly saw your name emblazoned on a decrepit old movie house marquee, what would you do? Well, there’s absolutely no question for the several characters in Nightmare Cinema who experience just this phenonmenon, and like any good horror movie stooge, they all simply walk into the theater, where they are promptly held captive as they watch a film ostensibly about them unfold. Let’s just cut to the chase and state that the movies on display don’t tend to end well for many of the characters in them, not necessarily limited to the “marks” who have been “invited” to watch. Nightmare Cinema is a rather interesting attempt to reinvigorate the horror anthology genre, with a series of people lured into the old time movie house where they meet their fates, in more ways than one. A quintet of “films within the film” unspool (each directed by a different person), and while they don’t really have a bunch in common (other than a kind of weird emphasis on scary hospitals in a couple of cases), there are some fairly cheeky “meta” references scattered throughout for fans who like to be on the hunt for such things. To cite just a couple of examples, both somewhat linked to the second story, Mirare , directed by horror icon Joe Dante — a nefarious plastic surgeon in this tale is played by none other than erstwhile heartthrob Dr. Kildare Richard Chamberlain, and then shortly after this tale of “artistic” surgery gone awry ends, we’re introduced to a linking character called The Projectionist, played by (in?)famous plastic surgery survivor Mickey Rourke.

The five stories and their directors in this enterprise are The Thing in the Woods , directed by Alejandro Brugués; the aforementioned Mirare , directed by Joe Dante; Mashit , directed by Ryūhei Kitamura; This Way to Egress, directed by David Slade; and Dead, directed by Mick Garris.

The Thing in the Woods is a riff on forested slasher movies (think The Cabin in the Woods, albeit with an over the top “reveal” at the end that is arguably even more gonzo than the one in the Drew Goddard concoction). This is kind of intentionally goofy, but it has some clever takedowns of genre expectations.

Mirare plays like an old Night Gallery episode (by which I mean it doesn’t quite meet higher The Twilight Zone standards), with a tale of a facially scarred young woman whose fiancé kindly offers to pay for some plastic surgery so that she feels better about herself. His motives are not exactly pure, as they say.

Mashit , while near hallucinogenic a lot of the time, struck me as more rote in its depiction of a Catholic school run amok (the “watcher” in this instance is a Priest). As such, it has an almost giallo type vibe at times, mixed with any number of stateside horror outings which prominently feature Christian iconography.

This Way to Egress struck me personally as the most distinctive of the films here, with a rather disturbing and in this case unabashedly hallucinogenic ambience (delivered via very striking black and white cinematography) in its tale of a mother experiencing what might be called a literal doctor’s visit from (in?) hell. This piece makes little to no sense in any way, but it has such a bizarre undertow, and its imagery is so repeatedly fascinating, that for me, anyway, its lack of coherence didn’t really matter all that much.

Bringing up the rear, so to speak, is Dead, the story of a piano prodigy who, like the plastic surgery patient in Mirare, finds himself in a kind of hospital hellscape, where he may not be entirely sure if the "dead people" he's apparently seeing including himself.

Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf liked Nightmare Cinema even less than I did. You can read Brian's thoughts here.

Nightmare Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Nightmare Cinema is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cinedigm with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The closing credits roll includes the Alexa logo, which suggests that despite the contributions of several directors and cinematographers, the same camera was utilized, and I'm as usual assuming that everything was finished at a 2K DI. This has a largely sleek and nicely detailed appearance, with the understanding that there are several long sequences in several of the "films" that are rather dark, where general murk can prevail and fine detail levels can be slightly lacking. There are various tweaks to the imagery, including POV shots by some unexpected "beasts" in one film (see screenshot 9), where things look skewed and probably intentionally a good deal softer. The black and white cinematography in This Way to Egress boasts excellent contrast and nicely deep black levels. The color segments offer a generally natural looking palette, though as seems to be unavoidable in contemporary thrillers, several scenes, notably a lot of the hospital material in two of the "films", has been graded toward ice cool blue tones. A lot of the material featuring Rourke is virtually swathed in darkness, and so detail levels can be somewhat less fulsome in these scenes as well.

Nightmare Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Nightmare Cinema features a nicely boisterous DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, though I had a laugh when checking out the English SDH subtitles and one of the opening descriptions said something like "meditative piano music" when there was a strident, Bernard Herrmann-esque minor second in strings blaring forth. That unintended comedy aside, the track itself has nice surround elements in all of the "films", with regular placement of ambient environmental effects and some quasi-subliminal anxiety inducing sound effects in the side and rear channels. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout the presentation and there are no problems of any kind with regard to damage, distortion or dropouts.

Nightmare Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements of any kind on this Blu-ray disc. The main menu only offers options for Play and Subtitles.

Nightmare Cinema Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Nightmare Cinema may provide some good pre-Halloween viewing for fans, though it's no modern classic. It seems possible that the film's creative staff are attempting to develop a new anthology franchise with the character of The Projectionist, but they might want to up the ante with regard to the "films" this character shows to really make this a going enterprise. Technical merits are solid for those considering a purchase.