Despite a banger of an idea, mixing a little metal, meaning music with a bit of sex, in the form of a succubus, Dreamaniac never lives up to it. To put it lightly, the film is boring and while there is some sex and nudity and of course, some blood and some murder, things are not as exciting as they could have been.

While the film is hampered by its pace and overall poor quality, it is still intriguing. It begins with Francis who happens to be having some bad dreams, bad in one sense yet good in another as they are filled with blood and a beautiful woman. Said woman is a succubus and there is a point where the two make a deal which as one might guess, favours the demoness rather than the gullible man. This leads to a party where the guests turn out to be mostly awful human beings with one being the very same succubus in disguise. Soon enough, bodies start to fall and things spiral out of control for Francis and those who live in the house.

Directed by David DeCoteau, he had all the necessary ingredients to create a great film, especially given that not too many movies out there feature a succubus as the villain of the piece. He could have packed this movie with sex and murder, blood, and guts and made it a truly visceral piece of horror. Instead, DeCoteau delivered a movie that was more or less soft in execution. The kills were not terrible and were the highlight of the entire affair given that everything else felt more like filler. There is a bit of a story about one girl joining a sorority, thus the reason for the party and a little drama as Francis tried to deal with his deteriorating relationship yet for the most part, it would just trudge along until those few blips where some violence was called for. The most interesting person in all of this is, of course, the succubus herself as played by Sylvia Summers. Her motivations are quite obvious as she is just looking for a meal ticket, yet out of everyone in the house, she at least manages to liven things up and keeps the audience’s attention focused on her.

With a rather poor story and script, the talent had little to work with and at the very least, their performances were not awful. They may not have been the top-tier calibre of actors one would usually see on the big screen but they did a decent job and there are no complaints. The special effects were also effective, and one has to give the makers of this film a bit of credit for at least trying to do something as best they could given what was most likely a small budget. At the end of the day, it all came down to story and pacing and it is hard to recover if one is already hampered before filming even starts. Altogether, Dreamaniac was okay but it could have been and probably should have been more than it was.

1.5 out of 5