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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8388706" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 68: February 1992part 5/5Into The Dark: James decides to take a trip into our collective subconsciouses  with a bunch of dream themed movies. Since nearly everyone does that every night, there's no shortage of material to draw upon for inspiration. This is one theme that could easily be dragged out over several months if he felt like it. But this is also a theme which can be a particular struggle to transform into a good story, between the abrupt and sometimes nonsensical transitions and the need for good special effects to evoke the proper atmosphere. I have no doubt there'll be some turkeys in this collection. Dreamscape sees government agents venturing into other people's dreams to save the USA from nuclear apocalypse. It was decent enough when it came out, but now seems very dated with the fall of the soviet union and dramatic change in geopolitics. Nightwish gets a mediocre result overall. It at least manages to be surprising, throwing a full kitchen sink of weirdness from various genres at our dreaming protagonists, but it fails to stick the ending. Project: Nightmare is only successfully dreamlike in that it bored James to sleep repeatedly trying to sit through it. The kind of flop the studios sat on for years and then pushed out on home video in an attempt to at least make a little money. It could have stayed in the vaults and no-one would have particularly cared. A Nightmare of Elm Street sees James baffled as to why this became a household name franchise. The first one is cheap and shoddy in writing, acting, editing & special effects and the sequels rapidly turn Freddie from frightening a into wise-cracking pantomime villain. I suspect that, counterintuitively is the reason. After all, look at the competition. Neither Vorhees or Myers are nearly as distinctive or fun to play, and who else has the staying power to join their ranks?Dreams (now there's an ungoogleable title in the modern era) is a collection of short films by Akira Kurosawa, all inspired by his own dreams, obviously. The quality of the stories is pretty variable, but they're all beautifully shot, and packing 8 into 2 hours means even the boring bits don't outstay their welcome. It's easily both the highest quality and most authentically dreamlike of this selection. A lot of very dated stuff this issue, be it the attitudes, the science, or the systems. It is at least dated in fairly interesting ways this time around, but still, there's not much stuff here I'd actually consider reviving and using. Once again, let's move onto issue 69. Nice. Lets see if there's any sexy stuff within, and preferably not in a rapey way.</blockquote>

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