Not to be confused with Peter Walker's 1974 British shocker of the same title, the early 80s "Frightmare" was a cheesy low-budget supernatural slasher made the more interesting for it having Jeffrey Combs taking on his first main role. Other than that it was an unmemorable drawn-out fare, which sadly had a fun macabre premise which had shades of "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things", "The House of Seven Corpses", "Theatre of Death" and "One Dark Night" but the execution while proficient was stodgily drab with little imagination. Although some atmosphere did find its way in, especially with the fog machine getting a good workout within its shadowy foundation. After the death of a legendary horror actor, a group of film students steal his corpse from the crypt and go about fooling around with it within the house where the actor had made some of his best pictures. However they didn't count on the actor's corpse coming back to life to exact revenge on them. Ferdy Mayne's histrionically high maintenance turns as horror icon Conrad Radzoff is full of Grand Guignol as he comes back as a vengeful corpse reliving his glory horror days. In murderous impulses, he starts getting migraines (well that's what it looks like)
actually he's using mind control as he goes knocking off the obnoxiously detestable bunch of characters which featured the likes of Scott Thompson, Luca Bercovici and Nita Talbot as the actor's selfish wife. These were a rowdy bunch you cheered, when they succumb to their grisly fate. Of the lot, Bercovivi and Comb's deaths were the picks. The offbeat script (namely with those live interactive moments) is disjointed and gets a bit repetitive, but it had an amusingly diabolical sense of humour to go along with its cheap jolts and crazy low-rent special effects. A silly, slipshod b-horror movie.
"Let's call it a wrap".
"Let's call it a wrap".