Whatever is in the aisles, there seems to be oatmeal in the brains of the people who made this non-movie. Misdirected by Andrew Kuehn and written by Margery Doppelt, both makers of coming attractions, it is an all-but-random compilation of clips from films that include Midnight Express, To Catch a Thief and Klute, along with such hard-core horrors as The Thing With Two Heads, Konga and Friday the 13th, Part II. Between clips, which are meshed in a bewildering string and almost never identified, Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen read idiotic transitions; their lines are uniformly without wit or insight. ("These are the movies that create our nightmares.... Or is it our nightmares that create the movies?") A couple of brief excerpts from an interview with Alfred Hitchcock are idly dropped in—he's the only person interviewed—among interminable shots of flashing knives, spurting blood and sweating faces. The only thing this movie proves is that even the scariest scenes, when taken out of their tension-building context, are less likely to prompt tingling spines than droopy eyelids. (R)
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