If you know Cassandra (Bobbie Jo Westphal) you’d better hope she doesn’t have a dream about you — seems like every time she gets a little shut-eye, somebody she knows dies a gruesome and horrible death. When she has a nightmare about her best, closest friends dying one by one, what does she do? She invites them all to come stay with her in an isolated, abandoned house. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The movie plays almost like an anthology of short stories, showing each person’s intended death in a dream, then what happens to them in reality (reel reality, anyway). It’s an interesting premise that really could have been juicy fun along the lines of the Final Destination films, but the threads that tie the stories together simply are not strong enough to create a believable bundle. Then there’s a strange departure in the middle of the movie that winds up making absolutely no sense whatsoever.
The stories-within-the-story offer a lot of variety: One involves sibling rivalry taken too far; another tackles terrible vehicular manslaughter; and another is about the consequences of theft. It’s a shame that the vignettes require more money to carry off their necessary visual effects — the Heebie Jeebies screenplay was clearly too ambitious for the budget.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson