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Despite the lurid title, "Nightmare in a Damaged Brain", this infamous Video Nasty is a rather unappealing experience. The film is poorly produced and largely unoriginal, thus meaning that the only reason left to bother watching it is that it was a part of the DPP horror fan's shopping list back in the eighties. Unlike a lot of films on the list, however, this one is actually quite gory; and while the plot often finds itself lost in tedium, at least Nightmares in a Damaged Brain has several gory sequences to fall back on. The plot comes together from a range of different sources; most notably the barrage of serial killer flicks released before this one, but the 'days' approach that was used to great effect in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and the classic story of 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' feature also. The plot follows a man on an experiment drugs program that is released from an asylum. He visits a few strip shows, and it's not long before he gets back to his murderous ways, and when his attentions become fixated on a certain family, they all find themselves in danger...Probably the first noticeable thing about this Video Nasty is the appalling state of the acting. There's a scene in which a young boy pretends to have been stabbed, and the reactions of the cast look so fake that it actually is painful. You can't expect good acting from a film like this, but here it's even worse than normal. The way that the plot comes together isn't very good either, as first we follow the mental patient and then the film skips over to the family he's going to stalk without any explanation of exactly what's going on; this makes the film difficult as we're left wondering why we've moved over to different characters. The gore scenes are too few and far between to please most fans of this sort of stuff, but when they do feature; they're certainly bloody enough. The ending, which depicts a murder scene that has been hinted at in flashbacks throughout the film, is massively over the top, but the blood flows freely and even though the effects are clearly fake, it's still a nice gory scene. On the whole, I won't recommend this movie as its rubbish, but fans of gory, poorly made slashers are likely to find something to like.
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