Nightwish is a frustrating mishmash of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Haunting, and Alien. That combination plays as schizophrenically as it sounds. Not even a bunch of familiar faces from ‘80s horror movies like Clayton (Destroyer) Rohner, Elizabeth (Silent Madness) Kaitan, and Brian (Fright Night 2) Thompson can save this turgid mess.
A group of parapsychology students go to a secluded house to conduct experiments to see if the place is haunted by an extraterrestrial supernatural entity. (No, really.) They get their answer pretty damn fast. Adding to their woes is the fact that the professor snaps and starts killing his students.
The opening scene where Kaitan is taking part in a dream experiment to see if she can cause her own death inside of the dream is intriguing. It all goes downhill in a hurry after that. Admittedly, there is some cool stuff here. The most effective scene comes when Kaitan’s head is shoved inside a glass box crawling with spiders, which contains a POV shot from Kaitan’s tonsils. (I think that might be a cinematic first.) It’s just that you can only get jerked around so long before your brain begins to check out.
Oh, and if you couldn’t tell after ten minutes this was going to end up being one of those “It was all a dream” things, you deserve your horror movie-watching license revoked.
The ending is less of a “Gotcha!” and more of an excuse to justify the nonlinear nonsense in the film. Scenes involving glowing green alien snakes and cyclones menacing the students are more puzzling than laughable, and the stuff with the alien embryos incubating in the victims feels like they came out of an entirely different movie. There’s also a Halloween 3-inspired scene where bugs crawl out of a crushed skull because, why the hell not?
I’m a fan of Rohner, Kaitan, and Thompson, but they are all mostly wasted. (Kaitan and Alisha Das do provide a fleeting amount of T & A, which does help take some of the sting out of it.) At least Thompson gets to play an unpredictable character as the asshole of the group who gets his kicks by running over poor defenseless bunny rabbits. Also in the cast is the director of Cleopatra Jones, Jack Starrett as the creepy professor, and Mr. Clean himself, Robert Tessier as his hulking assistant.
AKA: Nightwish: Out of Control.
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