Nightwish

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.

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.

You gotta give "Nightwish" credit for originality. It depicts some college students who go to a cabin for an experiment, and get more than they bargained for. It does have the sorts of thing that one can expect in this sort of movie, but the scene with the tunnels was the really cool part. The professor looked kind of like Christoph Waltz.

I guess that, once you get beyond the whole horror plot, the movie deals with the human subconscious (along with conspiracy theories about aliens). "Nightwish" is mostly your typical horror flick, but does contain some original stuff. It's definitely fun to watch.

So remember what Wendell and Stanley said.

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.

A group of paranormal investigators venture into an abandoned house in an area with the perfect history for their needs. After setting up their equipment, the otherworldly madness begins... sort of.

Cheap and absurd, NIGHTWISH saves all of it's real "surprises" for the big finish. The first hour or so is pretty bland, with little in the way of action or suspense. In the end, it's mostly nonsensical malarkey, held together by a heavy, gooey layer of cheeeze.

Still, the last few minutes are suitably icky / entertaining, and it's always fun to witness the musclebound Robert Tessier lumbering around!

Also, Brian Thompson is hilarious as the eternally-disgruntled, Dean!...