Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Review By: J.P. Mangalindan
JPMangalindan@TheCinemaSource.com

“Nightmares & Dreamscapes is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,” Steven Weber says in one of the DVD extras. As its namesake implies, Stephen King’s 1993 short story collection thrusts people—an embittered novelist, a traveling couple, an ex-con—into creepy situations. Sometimes the supernatural is involved; other times, King explores contemporary worst-case scenarios to maximum effect.

In some ways, TNT’s tackling of Dreamscapes is an accomplishment: the production values are second-to-none for a TV production, whether it’s a purgatorial town built specifically for Weber’s segment, You Know They’ve Got a Hell of a Band, or a recreation of 1930s Los Angeles for Umney’s Last Case, and the cast includes William H. Macy, William Hurt and Claire Forlani to name a few. With the exception of Forlani flailing around like a headless chicken, they offer rich performances, most particularly Macy as a bitter author and his 1930s counterpart.

Strangely, the more realistic tales are more effective than the outlandish: Autopsy Room Four, one of the few stories not originally included in the novel, succeeds the most in leaving a lasting impression. A snake bite leaves businessman Howard Cottrell (Richard Thomas) in a paralyzed state leading everyone to believe he’s dead. When Howard wakes up on an autopsy table, he’s clueless as to how he got there; while the doctors prep to perform the autopsy, Howard recalls the events leading to his predicament.

King must have ripped a page out of real-life medical accounts depicting traumatic tales of patients suffering in silent terror from faulty anesthesia during operations. It’s a scary thought and it translates into a scary work, mostly because it’s grounded in reality (What if this happened to you?). For a director, the trickiest obstacle is conveying an atmosphere of genuine believability, especially when it comes to King’s imaginative materials. When adaptations work, we get segments like Autopsy Room Four; when they don’t, we get something utterly ridiculous (don’t get me started on Battlefield).

Crouch End, with Claire Forlani, features great shots of a deserted town in an alternate dimension, but its wispy plot peters out 20 minutes in; another tale, The Road Virus Heads North feels like a flairless, corny King throwaway. The last Nightmares & Dreamscapes episode, You Know They Got a Hell of a Band, is probably the weakest. Character development is zilch: the married couple (Weber and Kim Delaney) trapped in a rock-and-roll purgatory of a town, are annoying creatures with no other purpose than to bicker. Weber reads like a dimwit drowning in 70s nostalgia; Delaney, despite being justified in her concerns, starts off as a paranoid pest and ends as a paranoid pest. You really don’t care whether they ever leave Rock and Roll Heaven. In the DVD extra, “Steven Weber of You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” Weber tries to wax philosophy (“Rock and roll lives forever...”) and tries to pull some allegorical meaning out of thin air (“Janis Joplin is in this!”), ...