Nightwish (1989)

Director:

Bruce R. Cook

Writer:

Bruce R. Cook (writer)

Genre:

Horror

Tagline:

In your dreams no one can hear you Scream.

Plot:

A professor and four graduate students journey to a crumbling mansion to investigate paranormal activity and must battle ghosts, aliens and satanic entities.

Plot Keywords:

Parapsychology | Female Nudity | Ghost | Abandoned Mine | California

Cast

Jack Starrett	...	Professor
Artur Cybulski	...	Bill
Tom Dugan	...	Wendall
Brian Thompson	...	Dean
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Alisha Das	...	Kim
Elizabeth Kaitan	...	Donna
Clayton Rohner	...	Jack
Robert Tessier	...	Stanley
Gayle Vance

Runtime:

96 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Australia:M | UK:18 | USA:R

Movie Connections:

Edited into Invasion of the Scream Queens (1992)

The box is more entertaining than the video

When I picked the unrated version of this stupid piece of sci-fi junk up in a video store, I thought I'd really like it a lot. The box made it look like one of those movies where anything can happen (due to a plot rooted in the dream-vs.-reality subgenre), which the freaky pictures seemed evidence of. It was the unrated version, so I thought I'd give it a look. Expecting an imaginative and scary film, I got what turned out to be the opposite. Even the original ideas it could have done so much with don't seem original when the movie is boring dreck. It quickly sinks into another boring plot about aliens impersonating people, with only one truly creepy moment out of the entire film ("Do I look dead to you?"). As far as the rest of it goes, the only other redeeming point (and the biggest enigma of the film) is that, regardless of whether you're enjoying it or not (which I wasn't), it oddly manages to maintain a feel of heavy dread (with no real pay-off, of course). Furthermore, why was this unrated? I have seen so many R-rated films of times recent and old that have much nastier stuff in them than this film has. (Not that I think a movie has to be gory to be good, but it would have at least livened up this crappy movie.) I would have to recommend this more to sci-fi fans than horror fans, but even the many sci-fi fans I've known would probably hate this stupid movie.