Nightwish (1989)

best movie i've ever seen.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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.

Nightwish is an obscure eighties horror effort; and I'm not surprised it never hit the mainstream; there's a hell of a lot of ideas in this film, and really that's the problem; it just bites off far more than it can chew and tries to do too much - the result is just a big gory mess. The plot would appear to take some influence from A Nightmare on Elm Street at first glance; but with all the additional nonsense that gets added in, by the end of it I wasn't really sure exactly where writer-director Bruce R. Cook got his inspiration from. Anyway, the plot focuses on a group of people researching dreams. They go to an old mansion where, allegedly, there have been some paranormal goings-on. It's not long after arriving at the house that the group finds that there are indeed some evil forces at work and pretty soon members of the group are being possessed, while others are hallucinating and nobody is really sure what is reality and what is just their imagination. I wasn't sure either because it's all so confusing! First of all, I've got to give this film some credit for the atmosphere; 'the old house' is a popular location because it brings with it a certain malevolence; and the director really capitalises on that well. Unfortunately, he doesn't match this with his plot and special effects. The special effects are a rather mixed bunch; some of it quite gory and realistic, while at other times the effects are ridiculous and look like something you'd find on a Saturday morning kids show. Once we actually get to the house, the plot rather just goes out of the window and instead we focus on the basic premise; which just involves the characters hallucinating and stuff. I really can't say any of this stuff is interesting and the only really well done sequence that occurs during the main bulk of the movie is a part that sees some of the main characters tortured. I started to care less and less about the film the further it went on and was so bored by the end that I really didn't care about the awful conclusion. Overall, Nightwish could have been decent; but due to poor handling it isn't.

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.

This movie is awesome, it has likable characters, is well acted, the cast (especially the 2 girls ) is atractive, there is nudity, gore and enough plot and special effects to keep you more than interesting. this movie is about a group of college students and their professor investigating alien phenomena in an abandoned and huge mansion where they are terrorized by ghosts and their own professor, and aliens.