Two shiftless lay about worm farmers pine for a little excitement. They get more than they bargained for when they unearth a woman buried in a shallow grave. Her friends, an all-woman cult of gunrunners, thieves, and killers (and possibly, one vampire) come looking for her and hold the pair of worm-wranglers hostage. Eventually, the gals initiate our heroes into their gang, but only because they need someone to act as decoys while they steal a shipment of platinum (or is it plutonium?) from the Mob.
Runaway Nightmare is a real head-scratcher. It’s a low budget, no-name, no-talent Bataan Death March of a movie that plods endlessly on without any rhyme, reason, or rhythm. It takes a collection of interesting ideas and promptly does nothing with them. At first, it seems like it’s going to be a Russ Meyer movie by way of Jeff Lieberman, but even the promising scenes of the all-girl cult members romping around fall flat.
It’s also annoyingly amateurish. I mean, I’m a fan of bad movies, but even I have my standards. It’s full of poor line readings, incoherent editing, and gratuitous ADR. It’s also the only flick I’ve ever seen in which multiple characters repeatedly overstate plot points and somehow it manages to make it that much more confusing. It shouldn’t be confusing because nothing ever really happens, but there you go.
The craftsmanship is so poor it isn’t even good for a cheap laugh. Take for instance the scene in which two cult members have a duel. One of the girls fires her gun, there’s a puff of smoke, and then one of the other characters has to relate to the audience that the gun was tampered with and she blew up. Man, it’s bad. That’s not even including the long, pointless dinner table scene that goes on forever. Or the ending that plays like a Ted V. Mikels version of Kiss Me Deadly.
If the film had been jam-packed with nudity, it might’ve softened the blow. However, whenever it looks like the girls are going to strip down and have a little fun, we only see them nude from the back or the side, which doesn’t help anyone. Teasing the audience with nudity and then not delivering in an already piss-poor movie just makes it that much worse.
The lesbian three-way shower scene has to go down in history as one of the most botched sex scenes of all time. It’s one thing if their relations are obscured behind an opaque shower curtain so the audience doesn’t even get a hint of skin. It’s another thing for the girls to exit the shower COMPLETELY DRY. What in the actual fuck?
In short, Runaway Nightmare is a runaway disaster.
thought this one was OK
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