Nightwish (1989)

Another title in my recent trawlings through eighties low-budget movies, Nightwish (1989) has a certain degree of potential in its basic concept, which, unfortunately, it fails to properly fulfil.  Part of the problem is that it effectively telegraphs exactly what its big twist is going to be in its opening sequence: a girl getting chased around deserted streets as if in a slasher movie, but waking up before she is killed to reveal that she is part of a university experiment into dream manipulation.  At which point you just know for sure that the whole subsequent plot is going to be revealed as a dream.  The only question is - whose?   Once the scene setting is out of the way the students involved in the project are invited by the professor running it to a remote old house in an area known for UFO sightings, to conduct further research.  The abrupt cut between the invitation made in the lab to the majority of the students suddenly in a van heading through the desert toward the house, filling in the details of the rumours of alien abductions and creature sightings through their conversation, should provide viewers who have seen enough such movies with another big clue that it is all a dream.  On arrival at the mansion, things quickly escalate, with the professor apparently turning into a mad scientist, complete with hulking half-wit assistant and the students chained up in a dungeon as experimental subjects.  Things escalate through apparent murders to alien experiments in the mine shafts below the mansion and even the odd ghost.  Ultimately, of course, it ends the way all horror  movies involving dreams end - with a character waking up just in the nick of time to reveal that none of it was real, only for another, inevitable, revelation that this might still be a dream.

None of which is to say that Nightwish is a bad film.  On the contrary, it is actually pretty slickly made, with decent production values and steady, if not exactly inspired, direction by Bruce R Cook, (this film being one of only two directorial credits for him).  Cook's direction becomes most effective in some eerily shot, green tinged dream sequences (or dream-within-a-dream sequences, to be strictly accurate) part way through the movie.  These, along with the opening sequence, are, not surprisingly bearing in mind the director's previous credits as a camera operator and director of photography, very well framed and shot.  Nightwish also boasts a better-than-average cast for this sort of low budget production, most notably Jack Starrett, director of Race the Devil (1975) as well as a noted character actor, as the professor and Robert Tessier as his assistant, (this was to be a last film for both actors, who died in 1989 and 1990 respectively).  Brian Thompson is also on hand as one of the students, whose inconsistent behaviour should also be another red flag to viewers that the main plot is a dream, while Elizabeth Kaitan, (some of us fondly remember her and her breasts from the later Vice Academy films), is also on hand as the film's main focus for its gratuitous female nudity quotient. Ultimately, though, what undermines Nightwish is its sheer predictability in terms of plot outcome.  Which, to be fair, isn't a problem unique to this film, it is a problem intrinsic to films which are built around dreams - their writers can never resist trying to put in what they all seem to think is a wildly original idea of revealing that, even at the end, we're still in a dream, despite it being the biggest cliché for this genre possible.  At least Nightwish does try to do something different by challenging the viewer to work out which of the characters is actually dreaming, (although even this shouldn't be difficult to guess).  Still, while Nightwish's conclusion might be predictable, the journey to that conclusion is at least enjoyable.