Satisfyingly seedy slasher flick that brings the oceans of gore and bad vibes that earned it a spot on the legendary UK “Video Nasties” list. It depicts six days in the life of a mental hospital outpatient who always wakes up screaming from blood-drenched night terrors as he makes his way down from New York City (some choice scenes in sleazy old Times Square here) to Florida on a mission to freak out a single mother and her three brats. His knife hand gets plenty of exercise across a series of slayings that don’t help his cracked mental state in the slightest. It’s a film from the same school of horror as Maniac. The killer’s insanity is its subject (the great alternate title: Nightmare in a Damaged Brain). Dreams, flashbacks and reality all blend together until you’re not always sure which is which. The producers lied when they credited Tom Savini with the splatter effects (Savini claims that he was only a consultant and didn’t get a drop of this film’s blood on his hands; the 30th anniversary DVD release amends the credits accordingly), but you can hardly tell. The blood spray, torn flesh and oozing stumps here are a hair or two less polished than Savini’s work, but are equally over-the-top. In the rare case in which a corpse effect is a little lacking, director Romano Scavolini spices it up with some live rodents crawling over the body. It’s also worth mentioning that this is on the shortlist of films that have landed people in jail over its content. When David Hamilton, the UK distributor, screened this without making ANY of the cuts demanded by the British censors, he spent eighteen months behind bars for it. I raise my drink to him.