Four short films linked by macabre twists make up “Fever Dreams,” a trip to the spooky side that’s more “Twilight Zone" than “Nightmare on Elm Street.”
Directed by Rob Underhill, all four shorts are linked by a trench coast and hat wearing guide who introduces each segment with sinister glee. The host is played by Jeff Briggs who gets a larger role in the first film in the series, “Agent.” It’s about harried agent Don Reynolds (Don Sill) who’s under pressure to deliver a script for a show called “Chiller.” But Don can’t find a script that works, despite reading many as he chugs down plenty of whiskey. When a disheveled bum (Briggs) shows up in his office with a stained and tattered screenplay, Don dismisses him. But the bum keeps showing up and events in Don’s life eerily mirror the action and dialogue in the script.
In “Entertainer,” a TV interviewer (Leanne Bernard) doing a story on a widower (Jason Caselli) who has preserved his late wife inside a glass coffee table realizes the story is even stranger than that. Black humor abounds as the reporter is treated to the corpse doing remote-controlled tricks such as an arm wired to hold a drink and teeth that serve as a nutcracker. “The Cameraman” is a twisted mother/son story about Simon (Christopher Marrone) who lives with his controlling mother (Neva Howell) and who works at a camera shop. Simon “borrows” an expensive video camera and documents his mother’s stroke as revenge until mother has the last word.
The final short is “It’s My House,” with echos of “Glengarry Glen Ross” meets “Night of the Living Dead.” R. Keith Harris plays a brash commodities broker who bilked seniors out of their savings. Now his numbers are down and he’s under pressure to deliver or he’ll lose his new house and sports car. His dismissiveness and rudeness toward the elderly comes back to haunt him when he returns home one day to discover that the nice old couple in his house claim it belongs to them. And the reason they’re still living there is not so nice.
