Nightmares

A portmanteau of four stories, three of them scripted by Christopher Crowe, the fourth by Jeffrey Bloom, hopefully in the Twilight Zone manner. The best of them has Emilio Estevez as a computer whizkid, obsessed with a space combat game, who finds himself engaged in a real battle that alarmingly ends in another world. Here Sargent makes effectively febrile use of the bustling activity of the arcades and the rock pouring from the hero's walkman in counterpoint to the video game imagery. In general, though, the scripting is unimaginative, derivative, and desperately predictable as the film limps through its jokily cautionary tales of a housewife who narrowly escapes a homicidal maniac when she insists on a late-night shopping trip because she's out of cigarettes, a priest restored to his faith and duty by an encounter with a demonic car, and a suburban family busy exterminating rats who find themselves confronted by a monster looking for its baby.