In short: Nightwish (1989)

After a short intro sequence that sets the “it was all a dream, but whose?” plot twist at the end of the movie up so clearly, using the term “spoilers” talking about it seems absurd, four grad students (Elizabeth Kaitan, Alisha Das, Clayton Rohner and Artur Cybulski) are driven up to a house where they are supposed to help their psychology professor (Jack Starrett) – introduced to us with green horror movie light shining on his face so you know he’s a mad professor – to once and for all prove the reality of some supernatural bullshit or other.

These guys have clearly even less of an instinct for self-preservation than usual for horror movie characters, otherwise they would probably have second, third and fourth thoughts on encountering the guy who is driving them (Brian Thompson). He’s clearly just a week or so away from starting on his first night as a serial killer, what with his obsession with running over animals with the bus and his general air of violent craziness, but instead of running away screaming into the night, one of the girls is even flirting with him!

Things don’t improve in the old dilapidated mansion in the mountains the professor wants to test, and all kinds of Fortean stuff starts happening very quickly. So expect ghosts, demons, alien insects who nest in people’s brains, icky mineshafts, drawn ectoplasm tentacles that have watched The Entity, nightmare (spoiler) architecture, a really uncomfortable alien mind-control masturbation scene, and so on and so forth. It also turns out the Professor likes torturing his students for occult science, with help from his even crazier assistant in practical matters (Robert Tessier).

If you want to see a film that really goes all out with abusing stuff like logic, sense, very basic ideas of how to plot a movie and so on with the excuse that everything in it is just a dream and therefore doesn’t need to make sense, Bruce R. Cook’s NIghtwish is just the ticket, taking on a nearly Italian horror dimension of illogic without reaching the actual dream-like qualities these films can have without pretending to be a dream. But then, it’s not just about the lack of logic with these things, they also need to create a specific mood to work their particular magic, and while the film at hand certainly has quite a few moody scenes – invariably lit in the classic horror colours of green, red and blue – they never come together to create one singular kind of mood over the whole movie. Or really, over more than two scenes.


The script, also by Cook, is more of a list of ideas of what would make a cool special effects or fright scene turned into scenes that never come together into any kind of a whole, be it a narrative, a mood, or a theme. These stitched-together scenes are generally pretty to look at and, at least, realized with high technical competence. Apart from the ridiculous drawn ectoplasm tentacle, the effects, a KNB job, are great. Particularly the alien breeding stuff looks excellently icky, but the rest of the bodily fluids and mutations are very accomplished too. I just would have liked to see all these technical chops in service of something that at least tries to be an actual movie instead of a show reel, but Nightwish never gets boring, so who am I to complain?