Welcome to My Nightmare (film)
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| Welcome to My Nightmare | |
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| Directed by | David Winters |
| Produced by | Robert Ezrin David Winters |
| Written by | Alan Rudolph |
| Release date(s) | 1975 |
| Running time | 84 min. |
| Country | U.S.A. |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Welcome to My Nightmare is a 1975 music documentary film on Alice Cooper's concert of the same name, directed by David Winters.
In 1975, Alice Cooper released his first solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare, and a huge theatrical stage show was put together to 'tour the album'. Whilst in the past the Alice Cooper stage show was semi-improvisatory, with confrontational elements of violence and satire (see Good To See You Again, Alice Cooper), the new production was purely horror-themed and professionally performed to the split second. With the edginess removed (gone were the bloody guillotine, the spit and the skewered baby dolls, although 'Only Women Bleed' presented a drunken, physically abusive side to the character), the Welcome To My Nightmare show was part a carefully-planned move toward a more mainstream-friendly 'Alice'.
Welcome To My Nightmare was a phantasmagorical exposition of music and theatre themed around a nightmare experienced by a young boy named Steven. Costing US$600,000 to produce, the show was a grand visual spectacle with an elaborate stage set, pre-filmed projections, four dancers, and elaborate costumes. Set in a graveyard/bedroom, a well-drilled band ran through the new album and a selection of older hits, whilst Alice encountered giant spiders, dancing skeletons, faceless silver demons and a 9-foot 'cyclops'.
Concert footage was taken from a series of London shows during September, 1975, but the film was a box office failure in its original 1976 release. However, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Phantom of the Paradise and others, Welcome to My Nightmare found a low-volume but dependable audience on the midnight movie circuit. The film is out of sequence with the live show, and the final Department Of Youth segment has some post-production inserts. The film was issued as a videocassette during the 1980s, and a DVD version was released in 2002.
Track Listing:
The Awakening/ Welcome To My Nightmare/ Years Ago/ No More Mr Nice Guy/ I'm Eighteen/ Some Folks/ Cold Ethyl/ Only Women Bleed/ Billion Dollar Babies/ Devil's Food/ The Black Widow/ Steven/ Escape/ School's Out/ Department Of Youth/ Only Women Bleed (alternate version)
References: Welcome To My Nightmare Umbrella Music DVD 2002 date=January 15 2007
