Nightwish

This is a unique one. I really enjoyed the twisted ending even though most

other reviewers did not. Alisha Das is the highlight of this movie, along with the two villains. I'm surprised no one mentioned the awesome bondage scene

where all the students, including Alisha, are handcuffed for a long time. One of the best scenes of its type. There are a lot of twists and turns and , yes, it is a low budget flick, but even after seeing this movie a number of times I'm not exactly sure what the director had in mind EXACTLY as to what happened in the end. I've seen much worse. Give it a try.

My review was written in May 1990 after watching the film on Vidmark video cassette.

"Nightwish" is an entertaining shaggy dog horror film, offering a few novelties to the currently overdone nightmare genre. It's a direct-to-video release in both R and gory unrated versions.

The late Jack Starrett (pic was shot in 1988) plays a parapsychologist working on deep sleep experiments with four attractive young students as guinea pigs.

Set in a remote spot near a mine, the fun of the film is trying to sort out what's real and what's hallucination. Okay final twists resolve the matter credibly.

Along the way there's impressively gruesome makeup from the team of Greg Nicotero, Robert Kurtzman and Howard Berger. Elizabeth Kaitan and Alisha Das are quite sexy as the coeds caught up in a paranoid dreamworld. Bald Robert Tessier (Charles Bronson's boxing opponent in "Hard Times") does a good job as Starrett's geek assistant.

I enjoyed the whole concept of this movie and by the end you start to see what it is about. But it is very confusing throughout. At parts it doesn't even make sense. With better writing, this movie could of been great. The cast was pretty bad. Clayton Rohner seemed to be the only one who knew how to act. Robert Tessier's character made no sense. He was suppose to be all messed up and kind of dumb. But he just talked normal and it did not fit his character. Now Brian Thompson was in this film and his character was pretty funny just for the fact that the acting was so bad. It wasn't so much how he acted, but what the writers wanted him to say. The film has some gore and some interesting parts, but with the way the movie was shot, it just didn't work enough to make it good.

A strange and unnerving film, Nightwish moves among horror movie conventions the way The Player moves among genres. Never quite comprehensible, the movie follows its own associative logic while pretending to become, at various times, an alien invasion film, a mad scientist film, a ghost story, a beast-from--beyond-perhaps-it's-Satan-himself movie, and uncountable others. The acting is quirkily good, the writing witty, and the off-balance nature of the scenes allow the film to move between eeriness, gross-out horror, humor and an even odder element of eroticism--the latter supplied mostly by the lovely Alisha Das, whose character at times seems to treat the proceedings like an especially elaborate session of unnatural foreplay.

That was totally screwed-up!? What this junky cheaply made b-grade production covers ranges from the premise looking into subconscious dreams, paranormal activity and Extra-Terrestrial involvement. Oh man everything (done in a very uncertain tone) but the kitchen sink in chucked into this one! The concept is original and strange, but it never truly comes together leaving the continuity being a complete jumble of unrealized ideas and far-fetched twists. It's illogically questionable, but maybe it's supposed to be so due to the bewilderingly tricksy context and one of those twisted endings. Love or hate it. But I found it rather effective.

How to give an outline of the story without revealing too much. Tough one. But here goes. A couple of grad students along with their professor head to an abandoned cabin to record and study some paranormal/otherworldly disturbances that plague the area. Not too long the indescribable occurrences begin to take its toll on the group.

It's silly, wild and campy (just look at those gooey, rubbery make-up FX and colourful optical special effects). Even then a dread-like atmosphere smothers proceedings and the growing paranoia is exceptionally pitched, as it's so hard to tell what's real or just hallucinations due to the genuine nature. As each others fears are conjured up. Trying to unsettle and overcome their senses. Amongst the sequences are some gruesomely icky deaths and titillatingly erotic inclusions.

Writer/director Bruce R. Cook erratically puts it together with some professional tinge and inserts few unusual imagery and experimental lighting composition, but at times it did drag. All talk (mainly uncanny babbling), little headway up until the last half-hour. The elastic script has some witty pitch black humour abound, but also random scientific theories. The off-kilter score is vibrantly rich and served up is a credible theme song of the same title.

There's a curious cast on hand. Straight performances between quirky ones. Jack Starret is deliciously malevolent and glassy (like out of some sort of mad scientist) as the professor with a hidden agenda. The beautifully magnetic leads Alisha Das and Elizabeth Kaitan are soundly good. Robert Tessier is enjoyable, but it's a testosterone imposing Brain Thompson ("the highway is mine!") that's a complete blast.

A fascinatingly nightmarish head trip in to the weird, which doesn't pull out any stops.