Nightwish

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.

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.

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!...

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.