Metacritic reviews

At its best, Nightbreed is like a living version of a coffee-table book, with each page filled with tentacled, quilled, or moon-faced monsters.

The background is more intriguing than the stumbling up-front story, and monster watchers will get full use of the freeze-frame facility.

Barker spins grisly fantasy out of sexual obsession, yet his style here couldn’t be less obsessive. It’s cluttered and rather incoherent, as though the trailers to four different horror movies had been spliced together.

Barker unleashes the full force of his special effects crew and the movie implodes in a cataclysm of jelly-fleshed creepy-crawlies. It simply loses its grip. [17 Feb 1990, p.3C]

Surrounded by Mr. Barker's visual clutter and lack of narrative energy, Mr. Cronenberg's presence only highlights the difference between a gruesome but first-rate psychological horror story like Dead Ringers and a mediocrity like Nightbreed.

Barker the filmmaker resorts to most of the horror cliches he chillingly sidesteps in his writing.

Writer-director Clive Barker's Nightbreed is a mess. Self-indulgent horror pic [from his novel Cabal] could be the Heaven's Gate of its genre, of obvious interest to diehard monster fans but a turnoff for mainstream audiences.

Sad to say, poor old Nightbreed fails even as failure - it's bad, but it's not memorably bad. The odor it emits is less the stench of an eternal hell than the stink of a passing purgatory. If nothing is forgiven by the time you've done your time in the theatre, all is certainly forgotten. [20 Feb 1990]

Barker calls his shambolic, uninvolving narrative 'scattershot'; put less kindly, it's as explosive and directionless as a blunderbuss.

Besides a lot of scenic driving in and around Calgary, Nightbreed does have its fair share of sound and fury, not to mention blood and entrails. But it plays as if Barker were making it up as he went along, despite the film's having been based on his own novel Cabal.