Sandman (1993) Poster

(1993)

User Reviews

Review this title
4 Reviews
Sort by:
Filter by Rating:
5/10
A Weird and Confused Movie, But With Some Interesting Scenes and Sequences
claudio_carvalho16 October 2003
Nick Hanson (Eric Woster) and his child daughter Amy (Tiffany Ballenger) move from Montana to Los Angeles searching for a new life. He rents a house with piping problems and he decides to work as a plumber and fix the pipe. On the basement, he finds bones and skulls buried below his house. A further investigation shows that the house was built on an ancient cemetery, but there were also recent bones. Later he will discover that there is a gateway to the past through one of the walls. An evil spirit is released in the house and starts to haunt Nick and his best friend.

"Sandman" (1996) is a weird and confused movie that does not make much sense. In the cover of the Brazilian VHS, it is explained that the director and main character Eric Woster died in the house where his character lives by natural causes in the last day of shooting. If the viewer pays attention, Eric Woster was also one of the writers of the story. Therefore, probably most of the edition of the film was performed without his participation. But anyway, it is not a totally bad movie and has some interesting scenes and sequences. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Sandman - O Mestre dos Sonhos" ("Sandman - The Master of the Dreams")

Note: On 28 July 2022, I saw this film again.
11 out of 13 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
6/10
Eric Woster's Movie
flathead4431 October 2013
Warning: Spoilers
Sandman is a paranormal story from the mind of Eric Woster. Nick Hanson (played by Eric Woster) is a single father who is haunted by unseen evil in his North Hollywood home. Hanson is a native Montanan, and in an effort to escape the evil element, takes his daughter back to his home, Columbia Falls, Montana. As he ponders his demise, he is visited by an angel (played by Stuart Whitman) on the top of Hungry Horse Dam.

Hanson eventually returns to California, is confronted again by evil at his house. I won't reveal how the film ends, but this is a scarce title and I hope you have a chance to see it.

Tragically, this film plays very much like Eric Woster's real life. In real life, he was very proud of his home town and wanted to include Columbia Falls in his movie. It was really exciting for the community when Eric brought his film crew to Columbia Falls on this project.

After filming in Montana, he returned to California to put final touches on Sandman. Eric has many familiar actors in his film and also made a point of including his lifelong friends in Columbia Falls scenes. I'm proud he allowed me to have that experience with him.

Eric called me in January 1992 as he was editing the soundtrack. He was laughing so hard because he'd just seen the part where I trip over the camera dolly in the bar scene. Just a couple weeks later, he was found dead in his house, the same house that was haunted in the film.

What a tragic loss, Eric was so young and learning his craft at such a rapid pace, who knows what he would have accomplished. Understandably, his family refused to have this movie released as Eric's autobiography. But having known him since childhood, I see his life story in this film.
8 out of 9 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
7/10
Deserves a cult following!
ketcham26-123 October 2014
SANDMAN is an extremely rare little horror movie that deserves a larger audience. For a low budget, independent project, SANDMAN is remarkably effective. Some of the acting is not so good, but the script is smart and creative with all sorts of interesting characters and surreal touches. Even the clichéd theme of "descent into madness" (not the only theme explored by the narrative…I'm not giving anything away) is portrayed in an original fashion (more a "death of affect" or "moral blindness" than yet another Jack Nicholson inspired psycho-trip) Like another reviewer, I think the abrupt transitions contribute rather than detract from the quality of the movie and it has a stylish, disorienting feel which matches the content.

I would love for this to become a cult film so that maybe someday we could get a copy of SANDMAN on DVD and some sort of fitting tribute to the director. Judging by this film, he had a lot of creativity and talent in him and would have likely gone on to great things. I'd love to see something wide screen and cleaned up and closer to what Eric Wostee intended.
4 out of 5 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
7/10
Flawed hidden gem
kbtoys1001 March 2021
Picked this up thinking it was a different Sandman movie, by the description I was not expecting much but when I popped the tape in I found myself quite entertained.

Sandman has a lot going on inside it. Time travel, car chases, a psycho killer, bar fights and stop motion dolls. Most times all of this would make for a confused movie, and don't get me wrong, I didn't totally understand what was happening but it all gelled together.

Sandman is well acted and has surprisingly good effects (minus the stop motion doll - wtf?!)

It's a shame lead and director Woster committed suicide after filming wrapped, he could have gone on to have been someone. Sadly, as it stands, sandman got a very limited vhs release and has since slipped into the cracks of time.
2 out of 3 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

See also

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews


Recently Viewed