Deathdream, originally titled
Dead Of Night, is a gritty, edgy, grim retelling of
The Monkey's Paw through the thematic lens of veterans returning to home from Vietnam. If you don't know The Monkey's Paw, so much the better. Then you won't necessarily know what's coming. Though the movie starts playing its rather strong cards pretty early.
Andy is an American soldier in Vietnam who is shot and as he lies on the ground bleeding he hears his mother's voice calling "Andy you'll come back. You've got to. You promised."
A few days later, his family, including a mother who can't seem to stop talking about "when Andy comes home", are sitting around the dinner table when a knock at the door breaks up the repast. The audience knows who's there. An Army officer hands Andy's father the letter. Their boy has died in Vietnam. If there's anything he can do...
At the same time, a truck driver picks up a hitchhiking soldier. He doesn't talk much. When his father comes down to investigate noise in the middle of the night, he finds Andy there in full uniform. Their boy is home, it was all a mistake. But now he seems so quiet and strange... and the police are investigating the murder of a truck driver found with his throat slashed.
Such is the grim beginning of Bob Clark's (of
Porky's and
A Christmas Story fame) Dead Of Night, a chilling but also tragic Monkey's Paw adaptation. It's tragic because of what it all means for the family and because of who gets killed and how it all ends but it's also tragic because it is a very intentional allegory for the soldiers returning from Vietnam as broken men or, depending whose review you read, for the war in Vietnam "turning men into monsters". I was alive when this came out but I'm kinda glad I was too young to understand what the war in Vietnam really did to the psyche of this country.
I like this movie a lot.
It is true that it is a slower-paced, low-budget film but I think those two things come out as strengths here. This story doesn't really need a budget beyond locations, cameras, film, lighting, actors, editing, those sorts of things. Clark does a nice job here creating a grim mood and sticking to it all the way through. And that's how I'd describe this, not slow, not "anticlimactic", but deliberate, consistent, and
grim.
Warning, this movie may suck all the air out of the room.
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