Nightwish

Nightwish, 1989, USA. Director: Bruce R. Cook.

When I can't sleep, I watch B movies.

This started a few years back, when I was recovering from surgery and had to be on painkillers a lot. Painkillers blunt pain by putting you in a numb little cloud, but that cloud makes it difficult to concentrate or take in complicated ideas. I learned that quickly, courtesy of William Faulkner.

Did I know when I picked up Absalom, Absalom that the Guinness record for longest sentence in literature belonged to that book (at 1,288 words)? No, I did not. I just thought it would be a good book to get lost in and forget about my recovery. Instead, I got lost in a single sentence, and it wasn't the longest one. At some point I realized I'd read the same sentence about 50 times and still had no clear grasp of what was happening in the story.

So much for Faulkner, but I soon found that I couldn't really read anything during my recovery. So I watched a lot of movies. I'd often wake up and not be able to get back to sleep, so I'd switch on the TV, but there was a conundrum: I wasn't really awake, and I was clouded by painkillers. I didn't want to "waste" a good movie on a muddied mind that wouldn't be able to catch or remember the finer details of what I'd seen, and, anyway, what I really wanted was to get back to sleep. So I needed to watch something that would distract me, that I wouldn't mind not remembering clearly, and that I wouldn't get emotionally or intellectually invested in so that, maybe, I would just be able to fall back asleep.

Scrolling through the options available on Netflix, I came across a little B movie from 1989 called Nightwish. How appropriate! Here I was, in the middle of the night, wishing I could fall back to sleep. The poster looked like this:

Perfect. No way was I going to get emotionally or intellectually invested in this, and if I forgot it, maybe that would be for the best. I settled in and started watching.

And that's how this all got started.

*****

Nightwish is a 1980s B-movie cornucopia. Zombies? Check. Ectoplasmic ghost-snake-things? Yep. Prom night horror? That's your appetizer. Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style corpse chunks? Um, yeah, don't open that fridge. Mad scientist? Oh, is he ever. Sadistic assistant who refers to himself in the 3rd person? "Sometimes Stanley gets to keep a souvenir." Snip! Haunted house with sad little child ghost? Yes, I think we can give you about 30 seconds' worth (and absolutely no more). Scary German Shepherd with threateningly, er, wagging tail? Grrrrrr. Aliens who use humans for food and/or breeding hosts? "He didn't bleed -- he was an alien! Bugs came out instead of blood!" Yes, I think we've got you covered.

It's okay, sad little ghost kid: We feel the same way.

Spoilers from this point on:

The main conceit of Nightwish is that almost all of it is a dream. We open with a young woman trying to escape the prom night zombie horror, but just as she's cornered by a zombie, she wakes up in a sensory deprivation bath, electrodes taped to her head and an angry voice commanding, "Complete your assignment, dammit!" It turns out that the woman is a grad student named Donna (played by Elizabeth Kaitan), and she's participating in dream studies while under observation by her fellow grad students and the Professor. The Professor wants his students to follow their dreams through to visualize their own deaths. None of them has been able to do this yet, and he's frustrated that they're not getting it. He tells them, "All of you must learn to accept the idea of death -- that moment when the Grim Reaper's cold mouth presses against yours. You must welcome death, out of curiosity. I'll soon have you all strong enough to face anything. Now, who's next?"

Everything that follows after that is a dream. The film doesn't want us to realize this at first, yet it drops some pretty heavy hints, beginning with the opening credits sequence. The film seems to think that since it's all a dream, anything goes, and in some ways, that's to our benefit. In other ways, not so much.

The movie gets fairly trashy in spots. Maybe not as trashy as some of the other films in Kaitan's resume (such as Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, and Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force), but I don't think the filmmakers were interested in removing Kaitan too far from that kind of territory.

For instance: Donna gets out of her dream bath in thin, wet underwear, saying things like, "Sex, per se, has lost most of its fear stimulus for me" — which, I guess, is why she's able to strip right there in the room with everyone watching. Okay, maybe Donna really is just so into the research that sex isn't a preoccupation for her. But it's no mistake that at the very moment Donna is stripping naked, the Professor is looking at her from the observation window and saying, "Very nice, Donna. The best so far," and a BIG PAUSE, and then, "—of all the visualizations." Come on, guys, really? As Donna climbs out in her wet underwear, a male grad student tells her, "You are definitely gonna be the star of my next [dream] session." Which is creepy but played as mere fun, harmless-guy obnoxiousness. We only ever see women in the dream-bath, though there are two or three other male researchers aside from the Professor (yet the Professor complains that "none of you is able to complete his training"), the opening credits come during a long, slow, close-up glide over a woman's naked body in a darkened sensory deprivation bath, and our main female protagonist ultimately has an orgasmic, alien-vapor-induced dream (within a dream) that's only interrupted by Donna (within the dream within a dream) in a see-through dress asking, "Kim, you're not gonna suck that icky thing — are you?"

At the same time, there are some nice touches. For instance, Donna has her introductory dream of a zombie eating some hapless victim and, far from being traumatized when she wakes, sits up in the bath, all smiles, and says, "I am starving."

Post-dream-bath credits, our crew heads to a mysterious house in the Southern California desert for the purpose of paranormal research. Donna, Kim (Alisha Das), and Jack (Clayton Rohner) ride in a van driven by a guy named Dean (Brian Thompson).

If you think you've seen Dean in something else, you probably have. Maybe you saw him in The Terminator (with a punked-up Bill Paxton), or in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or in any number of Star Trek shows, or, of course, as the alien bounty hunter in The X-Files.

Dean is a sadistic, maybe psychotic bully. What makes him interesting is that he seems to be the only one who has a clue as to just how silly this dream is, and he can't resist making fun of it and acting out, as if to punch a hole into this unreality posing as reality.

We come out of the credits to hear Kim dumping some serious exposition on us about "harmful trace elements" in the water that have caused mental retardation and congenital defects in the local population. While she's going on about this, we're watching the van veer over the road as if the driver is trying to shake up the passengers, or as if he's trying for a mountain-road head-on collision just to get Kim to stop talking.

When that doesn't work, Dean yanks the exposition away from Kim by swerving the van to run over a rabbit. "The field is his," he says, by way of justification. "The highway's mine." This causes a brief upset among the passengers, but then Jack starts in on some exposition, saying, apropos of nothing, "Frankly, when the doctor asked me to check into UFO sightings in this area, it worried me." And after that we get Donna talking about her research into local tribes and their "fierce demon" stories. It's so bad that at one point, when Dean stops to change a tire, Kim is sitting there next to him, continuing her exposition to him, even though in the dream Dean is not a fellow researcher by any stretch.

At any rate, the exposition sets us up for all the different directions this dream is going to take us (mutants, evil entities, evil aliens) once we get to the very scary, mysterious house.

(It's not really all that scary. Don't tell anybody.)

And Dean is off to do some unspecified work. Later, to remind us that Dean is still out there, we get to see him heading down the road, listening to bongo music (I am not kidding), and inexplicably laughing his ass off.

Back at the house, things quickly start going crazy for the grad students, the research assistant, Bill (Artur Cybulski), and the Professor. During what turns out to be a sham parapsychology session, the group gets a real visit from an ectoplasmic energy snake that comes dripping out of the fireplace.

Here's that snake close-up:

The Professor loves that snake. It's as if his favorite cartoon character from childhood has suddenly come to life to visit him in his middle age so they can go and frolic through the haunted house together. I mean, just look at the Professor's smile!

That's the happiest mad scientist I've ever seen.

The Professor is played by Jack Starrett, who died three months before Nightwish was released (video only). He seems to have followed the William Shatner school of acting in terms of — the sheer number — of dramatic — or, really, kind of nonsensical — mid-sentence — pauses — he employs throughout the movie. If you grew up watching TV in the 1980s, chances are you saw Jack Starrett here and there in The A-Team, Hunter, Knight Rider, etc., and he also had something in common with Brian Thompson (Dean): They both went up against Sylvester Stallone in different 1980s movies.

Here's Brian Thompson as the main baddie to Stallone's rule-breaking cop in Cobra ...

... and here's Jack Starrett as the sheriff's deputy whose sadistic treatment of Stallone's Vietnam vet in First Blood sets off the entire Rambo franchise.

As the Professor, he's got it easier. Still, it's a job keeping these bratty grad students in line.

That's it: I'm done with college students. Next time around, I swear, it'll be minions exclusively.

And, with his track record, the Professor has every reason to believe that there will be a next time around, because, as Bill points out, "This is your third university!" The Professor's reply: "Third time's a charm!" (He got kicked out of Duke before he came here to "Cal U"; don't tell anybody that Cal U is actually in Pennsylvania.)

During the first encounter, Donna ruins everything by jumping up and splatting the ecto-snake with her purse. So next time around, the Professor chains the students' and Bill's hands up so that they can't interfere when the ecto-snake makes another appearance. Somehow, he locks himself in chains as well. It's okay: It's a dream. These things can happen in dreams. Sure enough, the entity makes another appearance, this time as a sort of ecto-tornado.

No, I did not use a day-glo marker to scribble the tornado effect onto this picture. But somebody did.

The Professor is predictably happy to see the little glowing tornado. The grad students have a range of reactions:

Jack actually faints. Bill wets his pants. The tornado disappears, and the Professor (somehow getting out of his chains — dream logic) is terribly irate, believing that Bill's weakness has cost them their chance to go and frolic through the haunted house with the entity (those aren't his exact words). The Professor tells Bill, "You don't have the slightest idea of what parapsychology is. You're pitiful. Look at him! The man's unfit for graduate work!" More arguing ensues. Bill resigns. The Professor kills him and says, "Resignation accepted." Things spiral from there.

Stanley, the Professor's attempt at a minion, is brought in to dispose of Bill's body, which he does while singing, "We're off to see the Wizard..." (More hints that it's all a dream.) He's played by Robert Tessier, who also died very shortly after this movie was made, and whom you also almost certainly saw multiple times before in shows like CHiPs, The Fall Guy, The A-Team, Magnum P.I., The Incredible Hulk, The Dukes of Hazzard, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, etc. As Stanley, he appears from out of a trapdoor in the floor. The grad students see the trapdoor being banged on from below, and they freak out, believing the entity is back. Jack, especially, goes wiggy: "Don't open it!!!" It opens, and it's just Stanley.

Later, after Kim has escaped from Stanley, she makes her way to the house's vast basement and encounters a resurrected Bill. Bill shows her around the place, pointing out the decor of dead people who've become breeding pods for aliens (it's grosser than it sounds), and he tells her, "There's an opening for you." Suspicions that Bill is now an alien (or a host for aliens) are confirmed when Bill's arm suddenly falls off. Kim manages to fight back, hitting Bill in the head with a big flashlight, and then she turns to run away and runs smack into a boarded-up exit, knocking herself out.

Watch out for that—! Okay, never mind.

Ultimately, the entity gets Jack, Donna, and the Professor (and Dean, too, while he's driving — guess the highway's not his after all), and it gets Kim while she's trying to escape in the van. She wakes up in the dream bath. Surprise! (Not really.) True to Stanley's singing of songs from The Wizard of Oz earlier, everyone from the dream is here in their "true" roles: Dean is a thoughtful fellow researcher. Stanley's a security guard. An autistic handyman from the dream is a non-autistic janitor.

Just look how normal Dean seems here.

The Professor is pleased with Kim's dream: "Very good session, I'd say." Kim, on the other hand, has had it with this dream research. "I don't need a college degree this badly, Doctor," she says. She opens the door to leave, and there's another door, and another, and — surprise again! — she's still in a dream. But here comes the real twist: It's apparently not Kim's dream after all; it's Stanley's dream, and Kim is somehow stuck in it. Or: It is Kim's dream, and she's dreaming that she's stuck in Stanley's dream. Or: It's Stanley's dream, and he's dreaming that Kim is stuck in his dream.

In hindsight, this being Stanley's dream technically allows the film to get away with an awful lot. A pretty grad student conducting research in a tiered miniskirt? That's just how Stanley conjures her. Kim defending a bully like Dean after he runs over a rabbit ("He tried to miss it")? That's just Stanley, dreaming that a sadistic, psychotic bully can still get affection from a pretty girl. But who is Stanley? Is he a cognitively disabled thug? A security guard? A fellow researcher? We don't know.

But would you want to be stuck in this guy's dream?

Okay: That's scary.