Nightwish

Journeying to a house in the countryside, a group of parapsychology students and their professor find the area's past as a home for demonic entities has been unleashed and causing them to wonder if what they see is really there.

This here is a rather enjoyable and somewhat entertaining effort that has some rather impressive moments but still has some minor flaws present. Among the good parts is the fact that the film clearly has a lot of ideas present about what it really wants to be, and that manifests itself in a really chaotic framework here with all sorts of creepy things going on. From the drive out into the hillside with a decrepit, run-down house that really should not be visited by anyone, the creepy procedures that must be followed before the séance scenes, all sorts of rather freaky scenes being utilized before getting into the twist involving the real reason they're there and the ensuing reactions they have because of this, which really drives this one all over the place but really remains quite level-headed about itself. There's never any real sense about this being too confusing or obscure in what it does to really hinder it all that much during these scenes by keeping the story lines going rather well, never really putting itself in place to become too confusing since the streamlined second-half keep their actions on target with how the rest of the movie has been going along, and this in turn forces the stories into pretty entertaining versions. By doing these different stories, it also brings about the enjoyable manners of forcing them into the story, so there's all sorts of rather creepy hallucinations and different settings about this being utilized for maximum effect, including the scenes down in the underground tunnels and the whole final half being a fine action-packed race to keep things on track as this heads into a rather inventive twist that really sells this quite well. However, there's still a few problems with this one in the fact that, despite how well it handles things, the film never really can settle on what it really wants to be because it has so many different elements wrapped inside it. Being a film about a creepy old house that was used to summon satanic demons first, then it turns into a demented captor forcing his students to do what he pleases and then finally an alien pod story that gets shoehorned into the film in an attempt to showcase a few nasty special effects scenes and then tries to make all these story lines make sense and it does so only through the finale's twist so this can get a little confusing with all the different elements in here. As well, the film does take a while to get going with there being quite a lot of useless time leading up to the house visit and forcing this to take a long time really getting going. Otherwise, this one wasn't all that bad.

Rated R: Language and Graphic Violence.

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.

"Nightwish" is an interesting mishmash of a movie. Part supernatural horror, part sci-fi / horror, and part backwoods horror, all assembled into a muddled but interesting whole. Written & directed by Bruce R. Cook, it's nothing if not amusing, and this viewer thinks that it does succeed in creating atmosphere and a sense of weirdness. It's highly likely that Cook intended to smooth over any gaps / flaws in his narrative with that standard "it's all supposed to take on the tones of a nightmare" approach. All in all, it's a respectable, fun, but not great attempt to play in the sandbox created by Wes Craven a few years previous.

The parapsychology students of a reckless professor (actor / film director Jack Starrett, whom you'll know as Gabby in "Blazing Saddles" and the vicious Deputy Galt in "First Blood") head for the California wilderness. There they intend to explore / exploit the spook house value of a residence with a history. As the story plays out, the character of Kim (Alisha Das, "Firepower") thinks that she has everything figured out. But will she, or ANYBODY, survive to tell the tale?

Aided by a shuddery score by Mark Ryder & Phil Davies, as well as the guaranteed-to-gross-you-out gore effects by the KNB guys, "Nightwish" is pretty entertaining for the 80s horror-loving crowd. The cast - Elizabeth Kaitan ("Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2"), Clayton Rohner ("I, Madman"), Artur Cybulski ("The Hunt for Red October"), Brian Thompson ("Cobra"), Robert Tessier ("The Longest Yard"), Tom Dugan ("Hellraiser: Bloodline") - is entertaining to watch, although Starrett's ill health is apparent. He would die a year after filming, but before the movie saw a release.

Cook begins right away with unreality, with his Dutch angles adding to the dreamlike quality of the opening sequence. He takes us on a pretty strange trip; while the movie isn't altogether successful, it at least stands out in a decade full of slashers.

Seven out of 10.

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.