Given its title and the fact that the DVD's cardboard sleeve boasts "Starring: Robert Englund," I was surprised that I'd never given Slashed Dreams a go. However, now that it's in my rearview mirror I see that skipping it was my past self doing me a kindness. Thanks, me!
I came down with a big case of the uh-ohs right away, with the title card looking like something added hastily in iMovie when production realized they'd forgotten to include an opening credits sequence.
Turns out, I wasn't so far off the mark. The film was released in '75 as Sunburst, but Englund's Elm Street fame and the rise of the home video market gave an enterprising distributor a bright idea circa 1985: Give it a quasi nightmare-slasher title and slap some salacious artwork on the VHS box. With this cover, one wonders how many horror fans nabbed it at the video store with, you know, expectations.
Would those same horror fans have rented it if the cover still bore the art from the film's original poster?
At least their expectations might have aligned with what they got: a holdover hippie flick about finding yourself, feeling feelings, and, uh, learning how to simply be mind over matter about things, even if one of those things is rape. Yes folks, we've got another Chilling Classics outlier (à la Death Rage and Medusa), a not-horror movie that's been dumped in yon Creek de Mill.
Mind you, even if you were to watch Sunb--uh, Slashed Dreams knowing what it actually is, there's a good chance you'd still end up disappointed. It is a slog-and-a-half, padded beyond belief with full five-minute scenes of people walking, or driving, or sitting. It's not so much "poorly paced" as it is "not paced." Like, somehow it completely defies everything we know about time as it moves ever-forward. It's kind of admirable, in its own way.
We begin at A College, where Jenny receives a letter from her old friend Michael, who has ditched the trappings of The Man to go live in the woods as many a headstrong young fellow has done throughout the ages. Unlike those headstrong (and ultimately doomed) young fellows you read about in non-fiction, Michael seems to be thriving. After breaking up with her boorish, wealthy boyfriend Marshall, Jenny goes on a trip to find Michael along with Robert, another childhood friend who might turn out to be her One True Love.
During their journey, they make a pit stop at a small town general store, where they find The Proprietor (that's his name in the credits!) performing for an audience of no one in his back room. He then sings them a song, which is because The Proprietor is portrayed by the legendary 1920s crooner Rudy Vallée, and if you're going to get a Rudy Vallée cameo in your film you'd might as well let him sing.
Jenny and Robert continue on their way and we get so many scenes of them hiking and walking. SO MANY. There is a brief brown bear encounter, and then more walking and hiking. All of these types of scenes are set to ENTIRE tunes...warbled...by Roberta Van Dere. These songs sound like something that didn't make the cut on any volume of the Time-Life Singers and Songwriters series, but you might find them on, say, a "Songwriters and Singers" compilation CD sold for $5.99 at a truck stop. You know, they're like the musical equivalent of the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. When they do feature a singer you know by name, the song is a z-side of the absolute shittiest quality imaginable. No I would never buy one or more of those CDs why do you ask!!!
The point is, these songs will make or--oh hell, they're just gonna break you.
Also I love that the picture quality is so bad, this screencap looks like an impressionist painting.
They arrive at Michael's cabin, but Michael is nowhere to be found. Also, calling it a "cabin" feels generous, as this place is literally made of sticks and it's got giant, gaping holes in the roof. It kind of makes Jason's lean-to in Friday the 13th Part 2 look positively luxurious.
As Robert and Jenny are engaging in a little platonic skinny-dipping (they are truly an iconic will they-or-won't they couple!!!) when they're happened upon by two local Cletuses, Danker and Levon, played by Sunburst co-writers David Pritchard and James "not Stacy" Keach. (Fun fact: James "not Stacy" Keach was once married to Holly "not Judy" Collins!)
They're cartoonish and vaguely menacing in the way all post-
Deliverance local Cletuses are, making threats to Robert and weird, leering threats to Jenny ("I'd like to dive for her sponge!"). Sure enough, they show up at the cabin later that night and slap around and rape Jenny. Then we get lengthy scenes of Jenny crying and traumatized while Robert goes outside to be sad that he couldn't/didn't do anything to help her.
Finally, Michael comes home to his cabin and hey, it's the actor everyone who rented Slashed Dreams was waiting for: Robert Englund!
He comforts Jenny by offering her some homemade herbal tea and drawing an analogy between her sexual assault and his poison oak: The best way for him to not go crazy because of the itching is to move beyond it and ignore it. Or hey, maybe this traumatic ordeal was just her fate and she can learn something from it! Errrr, he gets points for actually talking to her and trying to help, I suppose, which is more than we can say for Robert. But it's sure something to watch him dole out this "advice." It's even worse to see Jenny say "I feel so--" and get interrupted by Michael with "LET IT GO."
Robert then decides he's going to go after the Cletuses, and I bet all those video renters were expecting the "revenge" part that horror movies of this ilk deliver. Well, he finds the Cletuses arguing whether or not they should head back to the cabin, he gets in a tussle with Levon...Michael and Jenny show up (seems like a great idea for her to be there), the Cletuses run off, and Robert is like "Well, that was dumb."
We get another song, another skinny dip (by all three pals this time), Jenny reading a bit of Khalil Gibran to perk herself up, and then she and Robert merrily walk off into the...you know, the sunburst.
Do I recommend Slashed Dreams? Fuck no! And yet...
And yet I find it to be a fascinating little curio. As I mentioned, it's some holdover hippie shit--I mean, the director's end credit is "Created by James Polakof" for fuck's sake--but it's decidedly a 1975 take on those remnant late-60s peace and love ideals, rendering them all about loving yourself. The self-help movement emerged into the mainstream and was a bonafide boom in the 70s, and if nothing else, Sunburst comes off as an earnest (if severely misguided) attempt at joining the conversation.
In terms of actual cinema, it's difficult to parse what, exactly, the filmmakers (that is, the creators) were trying to do. By '75, Deliverance, Straw Dogs, and The Last House on the Left were all a couple of years old--was this feeble effort meant to be a self-help rebuttal to those? That the way to resolve these kinds of terrible events is not through violence and revenge, but through self-reflection? Is it simply a cash-in mash-up? Is it an outta left field bridge between those films and 1978's I Spit on Your Grave?
Even more interesting, perhaps, is the way it predicts some tropes of the slasher boom that would arrive before long, but it does so in a sort of negative-image light. There's a scene in the small, sorta run-down country grocery store, but it's a wholesome place instead of a decrepit place you're wary of, à la The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. We get a Crazy Ralph-type doomsayer in The Proprietor, who warns Robert and Jenny to beware of "strange things" in the woods and advises them not to go...but he's also wholesome and nice, and he sings for them and offers them licorice candy. Early on, there's a classroom scene that predicts what themes the movie will touch on, reminiscent of the "FATE!" classroom scene in Halloween and others. Robert and Jenny are literally headed to a cabin in the woods--not to drink and screw (though they do consummate their relationship eventually!!!!) like proper horror youths, but rather to be closer to nature and "find themselves." There's even a tiny handful of first-person POV shots as the local Cletuses spy on our skinny-dipping heroes that would have been at home in Friday the 13th.
Again, it's impossible to decide whether or not any of the slight (and I do mean SLA-HIGHT) whiff of horror in this thing was even intentional beyond the awful plot device that leads to Jenny being immediately healed by the power of positive thinking. If nothing else, against all odds Slashed Dreams is the worst movie I'll be contemplating for some time to come.
