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Nightwish

  • 1989
  • R
  • 1h 32m
IMDb RATING
4.8/10
1.5K
YOUR RATING
Nightwish (1989)
A professor and four graduate students journey to a house in the mountains to investigate paranormal activities, but the experiment goes awry after an alien entity starts attacking them.
Play trailer1:39
1 Video
42 Photos
Body HorrorHorrorMysterySci-Fi

A professor and four graduate students journey to a house in the mountains to investigate paranormal activities, but the experiment goes awry after an alien entity starts attacking them.A professor and four graduate students journey to a house in the mountains to investigate paranormal activities, but the experiment goes awry after an alien entity starts attacking them.A professor and four graduate students journey to a house in the mountains to investigate paranormal activities, but the experiment goes awry after an alien entity starts attacking them.

  • Director
    • Bruce R. Cook
  • Writer
    • Bruce R. Cook
  • Stars
    • Brian Thompson
    • Jack Starrett
    • Elizabeth Kaitan
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    4.8/10
    1.5K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Bruce R. Cook
    • Writer
      • Bruce R. Cook
    • Stars
      • Brian Thompson
      • Jack Starrett
      • Elizabeth Kaitan
    • 37User reviews
    • 30Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Videos1

    Trailer
    Trailer 1:39
    Trailer

    Photos42

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    Top cast14

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    Brian Thompson
    Brian Thompson
    • Dean
    Jack Starrett
    Jack Starrett
    • Professor
    Elizabeth Kaitan
    Elizabeth Kaitan
    • Donna
    Alisha Das
    Alisha Das
    • Kim
    Clayton Rohner
    Clayton Rohner
    • Jack
    Artur Cybulski
    • Bill
    Robert Tessier
    Robert Tessier
    • Stanley
    Tom Dugan
    Tom Dugan
    • Wendall
    Gayle Vance
    Gayle Vance
    • Fruit Stand Lady
    John Hayden
    • Fruit Stand Boy
    Jared Coulter
    • Ghost Boy
    Kazuko Ohashi
    • Slug Girl#1
    Elizabeth Hegyes
    • Slug Girl#2
    Joanne House
    • Title Sequence Model
    • Director
      • Bruce R. Cook
    • Writer
      • Bruce R. Cook
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews37

    4.81.4K
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    Featured reviews

    chelano

    the highway is mine

    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.
    estroh

    edgy horror movie. Interesting ending.

    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.
    6kannibalcorpsegrinder

    Enjoyable if somewhat flawed supernatural thriller

    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.
    lee_eisenberg

    night of oddity

    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.
    8Patguy

    General praise for an unexpectedly fine movie

    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.

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    Related interests

    Jeff Goldblum in The Fly (1986)
    Body Horror
    Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby (1968)
    Horror
    Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (1974)
    Mystery
    James Earl Jones and David Prowse in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
    Sci-Fi

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Special effects makeup was done by the newly formed KNB EFX, Nightwish was their second movie. KNB EFX are responsible for the special effects on The Walking Dead.
    • Goofs
      Clayton Rohner's character Jack has part of his right hand ring finger cut off, only to have his left hand bandage in the next scene and his properly injured hand bandaged in the scene after that.
    • Quotes

      Dean: The highway's mine.

    • Connections
      Featured in Invasion of the Scream Queens (1992)
    • Soundtracks
      Nightwish
      Written and Performed by Phil Davies and Mark Ryder

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    FAQ14

    • How long is Nightwish?Powered by Alexa

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • April 21, 1990 (Taiwan)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Nightwish - Out of Control
    • Filming locations
      • Los Angeles, California, USA
    • Production companies
      • Channel Communications
      • Wild Street Pictures
      • ZIV International
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 32m(92 min)
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Ultra Stereo
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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