Death Dream

Despite the master effects work by genius Tom Savini, this movie doesn't sound all that great, and the box art doesn't do much to lend it credibility either. Though, I think we can all easily agree the absolute best part of this box is the Gorgon Video logo. What an absolutely killer, kick-ass logo and company name, right? I sincerely hope they're still around in some capacity. One of the major problems with VHS dwindling into the night, and now DVD doing somewhat the same, and everything going digital, is we no longer have these bizarre mom and pop corporations with rad out of this world logos and names. I miss that. I miss the strangeness of it all. But hey, we're not here to discuss my growing resentment for a once beloved industry I've watched waste away into digital nothingness, we're here to discuss bad box art, and this one is pretty rough.

Arguably at first glance it's clearly not that terrible, until you actually take a look at what the visuals are. The guy on the cover is ghastly pale, with blood seeping out from under his helmet and a mouth that doesn't at all fit size wise on his face. His mouth is too fucking tiny. Tiny Mouth Tim here looks like he's enjoying having his brain bleed out all down his head. That's an O face if I've ever seen one, and you're welcome for that visual.

I do love the tagline though: "A boy went away to war...and something unspeakable came back!"

Was it a man? Did he leave a boy and come back a man? Did he have his Bar Mitzvah while he was in Vietnam? Gives a whole new meaning to the term "surprise party" when you're ambushed by the Vietcong. I will give them props for the font, it's an absolutely killer font, and the color scheme of the whole thing works really well together too. I love the whole tinted greyish blue and black look. Really solid. But that painting, man. That goddamned O face. Also the back blurb basically leaves nothing to the imagination! It essentially outright spoils whatever cool shit you might have to look forward to! And there aren't even, for once, any screencaps of the film, which in most cases would be a good thing but in this case I actually would kind of prefer to have.

Thankfully, as with many movies from this time period, there's many variants, and many of those variants under retitles. But let's look at the first variant I found.

Check this bad boy out. Now this is a box worth looking at!

While I argue it's a "video for pleasure" - because I guarantee absolutely nobody found this pleasurable - I have to give mad props to another great font (even better than the first, honestly) and an absolutely killer painting. This thing blows that first one right out of the water, really, there's no comparison. Sure, it's captured in that quaint little box like a lot of VHS work was at the time, but that's not really the artists fault. That's just how Video for Pleasure released things. And yes, that is the company name. Like a shitty dime store Cinemax, it's certainly no Gorgon Video, but still, it's really well done and much better than that last thing that tried to pass itself off as art. Okay sure, the fact that the black doesn't wrap around to the back is an odd visual choice, and once again there's no screencaps, but who cares. When the art is that solid, who cares.

But now let's look at a differently titled variant.

This thing, hoo boy.

Where the previous was a Dutch release, this one is German, and certainly Skyline Video is a way better name and logo than Video for Pleasure - which, quite frankly, sounds like a parody of a video release company - but it all still reeks of that hokey poorly painted art that seems to be going for a somewhat 1940s Gone with the Windesque design. The fonts this time around, outside of Skylines, are pretty bland and while the color work and art isn't by any means bad, they're just nowhere near as gripping as the Dutch version. Still a step up from where started, certainly, but nothing to write home about while bullets whiz around you in Vietnam.

But hey, we do get some screencaps with this one, at long last! And...

...why was I asking for these again? Now that they've been presented and Zombie Leonard Nimoy seems to be staring me in the face, I can't help but wonder if asking for screencaps was an error on my part. These are just...so bland, so very very bland. In fact, if you didn't know any better, most of these could likely be passed off as Daytime Soap Opera screencaps. They're just that level of generic. I hate to be so mean, because sure, it isn't anywhere as bad as the original we started with (as variants rarely are) but it's also so lackluster when compared to the Dutch one. I will admit that Dead of Night is a much better title than Death Dream, which isn't much of a surprise really. Dead of Night is an actual phrase. What the actual fuck is a Death Dream?

And I don't want a goddamned metaphor, I want an actual answer.

This isn't a college English course. This is a VHS. Give me reason.

So yeah, that's Death Dream and one of its potentially many variants. I didn't search too hard for others because I figured these were enough to make a point, and that point is that VHS box art was in a league all its own, often a league worth being in the past. Not that DVD cover art was much better, most of the time, for these leftover gems, if they even managed to make their way to DVD. People often state that some movies, thanks to the plethora of content that's available, are being abandoned and forgotten, left to rot in the passage of time, and I think sometimes that's not entirely a bad thing.

Though, truth be told, I'd absolutely hang that second one on my wall, because that's a piece befitting a rockin pad. And you can absolutely be rest assured I will be getting a Gorgon Video tattoo in the very near future, but that's the best goddamned tramp stamp design I've ever seen.