BURIED TREASURES : NIGHTBEAST (1982)

 With the world still in the throes of the Coronavirus epidemic, bringing to mind images of brave scientists in hazmat suits investigating THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, forced isolation has brought me back to the blog after an unfortunate personal health crisis kept me away from the keyboard. Not as much because I was unable to write, but my heart just wasn't in it.

So I've been struggling to find he best thing to reboot this blog and bring it back to life, and with the help of new contributor DJ XL5, who has heavily left his mark on the Montreal Fantasia Film Festival since 2004 ,notably with his wildly popular annual video collage events, we are trying something new. 

It is with great pride that I welcome DJ XL5 to the BRAIN DEAD & LOVING IT family to inaugurate a new segment that will offer a new look at low-brow, forgotten, often maligned films that may...or may not, be worth a second look.

Without any further ado, here is DJ XL5's review of Don Dohler’s NIGHTBEAST (1982) 

It’s one thing to indulge in your classic guilty pleasures, like enjoying a piece of chocolate cake before bed, but some movie productions take the “guilty pleasures” concept to astonishingly new heights.

Don Dohler’s NIGHTBEAST (1982) is one of those blissful “so bad, it’s good” movies. It brings to the fan of bad movies the kind of happiness felt by discovering for instance a REEFER MADNESS (1936), PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959), TROLL 2 (1990) or SAMURAI COP (1991) for the first time. 

 

NIGHTBEAST cheerfully baffles any comprehension. It’s a fast and furious piece of anything goes. There are so many things to marvel at with this film, it's hard to know where to start. Each bit of dialogue is altogether appalling, the art direction is highly questionable and each murder committed by the alien monster is thoroughly hilarious - the creature DOES kill a lot of people, sometimes with a laser gun charmingly spouting a ''pew, pew'' sound effect, occasionally by tearing off the face of its victims or by slowly and languidly disemboweling their bodies. 

You also get an astoundingly unsexy love scene which in itself is a piece of anthology, an epic two and a half minutes long unexplained explosion and a memorably ineffective shootout. The question “what was he thinking” constantly keeps popping up in your head for the whole 80 minutes duration of the film. As a bonus, everyone in this fictional small village is resolutely stupid and incompetent, especially the mayor and his party animal drunken sex-crazed nympho secretary who both takes this ALIEN wannabe movie into an unpredictable jawsploitation territories. 

Tom Griffith as the heroically curled Sheriff Cinder.

 


The acting is amusingly amateurish and more than often over-the-top, but Dohler’s low-budget visual effects are highly entertaining and confirm an undeniable love and care for the arts and crafts of making movies. The whole adventure looks the kind of film that every 12-year-old amateur filmmaker would dream of making during a wild summer of sweaty latex appliances and innumerable jars of corn syrup. 

Yet it was in fact produced, written and directed by a bunch of adults who just couldn't fathom the inanity of their project. The tag line of the movie in itself is priceless: "If you have the guts, he wants them". 

The soundtrack sounds like a cat was caught sleeping on a synth keyboard and occasionally stretches in order to change some chords. Most incredibly, that soundtrack is performed by none other than J.J. Abrams. Yes. That same J.J. Abrams who revitalized the STAR TREK franchise and brought the STAR WARS saga to its conclusion. Needless to say, his career in music was thankfully short-lived.

Director Don Dohler shares his enthusiasm with friends.

Don Dohler, a Baltimore native like fellow maverick filmmaker John Waters, projects the enthusiasm of someone enjoying making films with friends. Between 1978 and 2007, he directed seven of these basement budget productions. Although Don Dohler doesn’t have the means to match his ambitions, nor the talent, the whole production manages to feel honest and unpretentious. 

In the 70’s and the 80’s, Dohler was the publisher of the CINEMAGIC magazine (First as a fanzine spawned in 1972, and then published through Starlog from 1979 on), which provided amateur Super 8 filmmakers step-by-step articles about special effects and shooting tips for their low-budget productions. Everything from Stop Motion to Matte painting to foreground miniatures was discussed in this Starlog distributed publication. J.J. Abrams among others was an avid reader of Dohler’s magazine and met the Editor while he was just in his teens. The rest as they say is history.


The film is available in a sumptuous Blu-Ray edition by Vinegar Syndrome featuring a newly scanned & restored in 2k from its 16mm camera original, along with a series of special features.

If you want to learn more about Dohler, you may check out the documentary Blood, Boobs & Beast, available on Youtube in its entirety.