Nightdreams

reviewed by Nick Burton

Published November 1st, 1998

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I find it almost impossible to sit though an entire hard core porno film for the simple fact that the genre exists solely on sexual action. There’s no room for plot (or imagination). It only get’s in the way. So, when the rare porno film tries something even remotely different it stands out like a sore thumb (or other appendage).

Nightdreams, made in the 1980’s by a director named F.X. Pope and often shown in an edited version during the early days of pay and cable T.V., is such a film, if not a fairly outrageous dip into sexual fantasy. Dorothy Le May (as in whatever happened to) stars as a housewife who has been hooked up to a bunch of electrodes that monitor all her vital signs as she writhes around in a dark laboratory for a pair of scientists who have popped her full of hallucinogenics. The film, therefore, is a series of “reinactments” based upon the sexual fantasies she’s suppossedly having in the laboratory. The fantasies are downright strange: there is an encounter with a life-sized white-faced Jack-in-the Box, a three-way cowgirl fantasy that takes place around a campfire and is set to the sound of Wall Of Voodoo’s remake of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and a sconce where two Arab Sheiks use Le May as a human hookah pipe.

The film has some truly bizarre moments of surreal humor. One can’t help but watch in disbelief as Le May encounters a man in a giant Cream Of Wheat Box whom she Monicas to a hip version of “Old Man River” while a giant slice of Wonder Bread dances behind them, playing the sax, no less. In one scene, when Le May is serviced by Satan himself in Hell, I could’ve sworn there was a shot of Le May sharing a post-coital smoke with a wheezing fish head.

Pope also made the cult porn flick Cafe Flesh, and though not nearly as amusing as this, it was still fairly interesting for hardcore.