Nightbreed
This is a bit disjointed, it has so much cool visuals it gets a pass. Feels like a pilot for a TV show that never came. At least there’s a Director’s Cut.
The story us simple: boy had weird nightmares, goes to therapy, and that dude is the freaking antagonist! His girlfriend is loving, but he brushes her away, he will deal with this alone. The therapist gives him LSD, for him to freak out even more!
He is taken to a mental hospital, where he meets a dude that mentions the city of his dreams, before ripping his hair off. Boy goes explore the source of his nightmares and sees a city of freaks.
He is blamed for dozens of murders, feels guilty even though he doesn’t remember, then gets gunned down by cops instigated by his therapist.
He then gets back to life, befriends those freaks, lures his girlfriend there, and she still loves him, after his deformities are apparent.
He rescues her and gets jailed, while fascists massacre minorities. Our protagonist still has time to be reconciled with his girl friend, take over mayoral duties, and release the kraken, I mean, The Berserkers. The existing leader is weak, be wants to stay in the shadows forever.
The freaks have custom costumes, the villains are generic stock characters, while our protagonist is a greaser, and his girlfriend a pin up girl. She meets another girl with a Southern accent that gets murdered right away.
What the hell is Cronenberg doing as an actor? And playing Patrick Bateman meets Agent Smith, the personification of a corporate killer. How ironic.
There’s also the police chief, a purely evil fascist pig. He is already a dickwad that pulls rank over the other evildoers, but he goes nuts when mounting a posse of Peckinpah-ish rednecks, gunning down defenceless people. That is their true calling.
The corporate killer has button eyes like Coraline, and there’s a villain that says he will “rip out your head and shit down your neck”, from Full Metal Jacket. The Danny Elfman score has children’s choirs and arpeggios, as you do. The female lead was later the voice of Tannenbaum in Bioshock.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.