Julian’s idea is to make “The Bum” his narrator, and presumably author of the rest of the stories. With bad blacked out teeth and unconvincing maniacal laughter, as he tries to twist each tale to the film’s title (“Maybe he’s having a Fever Dream!!”) he’s not exactly a welcoming host. No Cryptkeeper, he.
It would be too uncharitable to say the kind of crap scripts the agent was tossing were not so far from what makes up “Fever Dreams.” But things don’t look up with the next tale, based on a 2000 one act by Underhill about a guy (Jason Caselli) who has embalmed his late wife (Kristi Ray) and put her on display inside a glass coffee table. More than that, he’s wired her to give him the remote and be a footrest.
Appallingly sexist and tasteless now, it almost makes you hope for another script by the Julians.
It comes with the most fully realized story, about a nerdy camera store clerk (Christopher Marrone) who steals an expensive video camera to make a humiliating movie about the strict mother (Neva Howell) with whom he lives. The comeuppance isn’t quite clear, but neither is it in the concluding tale, about a cad (R. Keith Harris) who is in debt, selling bad stocks and flipping house, confronted by the elderly couple (Catherine Sewell, Owen Daly) who were victims of his.
Harris puts in a good performance in a film where it seems only the supporting women (Dora Patel, Leanne Bernard, Hannah Elsie Chapman) tend to be standouts. And the prothetic horrormakeup is suddenly impressive after a film of lesser efforts.
You have to give it up for a group that keeps slugging away at this Raleigh-Durham based production years, apparently, after it was first released. But maybe hopes for a wider audience is the biggest fever dream of all.
“Fever Dream” is available on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Plex.