Arrow Video, out now

As her marriage to decorated war hero Oliver draws near, well-heeled Diana moves into her sprawling new London home where she starts to experience strange and terrifying nightmares.

Harley (Black Moon Riding) Cokeliss’ (credited as Cokliss) 1988 horror pic, released by Palace Pictures, arrived on a wave of anticipation that could not realistically be met. All hopes were that it would be ‘the next big thing’, a fusion of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser… it wasn’t. Thirty-two years later it’s easier to judge it in on its actual merits with this Blu-ray premiere from Arrow, which also includes the one-minute-shorter Director’s Cut.

Jemma Redgrave (Doctor Who) makes her screen debut as the troubled young bride-to-be, preparing to marry Oliver (a slimy Time and the Rani’s Mark Greenstreet). Most of the movie’s promotional material focused on images of the demonic journalists played by Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail and their various stages of decomposition, and there’s plenty of practical latex and gore effects to justify the horror label. Unfortunately, endless dream sequences don’t make for a tense thriller, and the ending is so ‘oh, is that it?’ that you’ll invariably come away disappointed.

Where Arrow come up trumps is in the impressive bunch of extras that they’ve crammed onto the disc. And because the movie never had a DVD release, it’s high time that it was available in a modern format. A new director-supervised 2K restoration from the original camera negative, inclusion of Director s Cut and Original Theatrical Version, audio commentary, interviews, ‘making of’ documentary, trailer and stills round off an impressive package.

Verdict: As a movie, Dream Demon offers nothing new to the ‘dream horror’ genre, but it has never looked finer, and the extras tell you all you could possibly want to know (and more). 8/10

Nick Joy

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