If any of you out there remember last year’s Marathon list, and I know I don’t, you might remember a little film by the name of Hellraiser. You know, guy finds a magic puzzle box that opens a doorway to Cthulu’s creepy sex dungeon, loses his skin and then Pinhead gets very non-consensual with everyone involved. Well you might also recall that said film was written and directed by noted horror writer Clive Barker, who combined the supernatural with freaky sex stuff long before ‘50 Shades of Grey’. While he’s never had the reach of Stephen King, Clive Barker was definitely the young rebel badass of the paperback novel game in the day, especially after the success of 1987’s Hellraiser and its’ subsequent enfranchisement. It was the success of that movie, one of the few films that was written, directed, and adapted from the same person, that no doubt gave the studio heads the confidence to fund his next directorial work, whenever that day would arrive. Three years later, we got Nightbreed.
I’m pretty sure the only one that really understands the story in Nightbreed is Clive Barker, but I’ll try to give the shortened version for those interested. Aaron Boone is an average white Canadian, with an average white Canadian girlfriend named Laurie, who apparently has bizarre dreams that pertain to a city called Midian, wherein monsters live, and also gruesome murders for some reason. Turns out these murders aren’t dreams but reality, committed by his psychiatrist Dr. Dekker, who manipulates to get Boone murdered by the fuzz. However, before Boone dies he finds out that Mideon really does exist, populated by a race of monsters known as the Nightbreed. Being a Nightbreed is supposedly super cool according to Boone, so he's super psyched when he gets to come back from the dead and join up with these ugly bastards in their underground city. All good things come to an end though, and when Laurie ends up in Mideon searching for Boone’s missing corpse, it sets off a chain of events that spells bad roads ahead for the Nightbreed.
So onto the positives… well, much like Event Horizon, Nightbreed does not skimp when it comes to art design and special effects. If you were a big fan of the Cenobites back in Hellraiser, then you’ll be pleased to find out that Clive Barker has doubled down on bloody gore and weird monsters this time around. Nightbreed might be worth it just for the scene where Laurie makes her way through Mideon, and we get to see all the Nightbreed in their natural habitat. Just the range of creatures that we get to see is impressive, all unique, all gruesome in their own special way. If you remember the scene in Star Wars where Luke and Obi-Wan step into the cantina for the first time, and it’s just a sea of aliens, aliens that don’t look like humans with pointy ears even, it's a bit like that. Only spoooooooky.
Also worth noting, Danny Elfman does the score for this film. Now I’m big Elfman fan, whether it’s his film work or Oingo Boingo, but I don’t think it really works out Nightbreed. By the end it’s more-or-less, but when you got a scene where some dude literally rips his scalp off of his head and that goth circus march comes barreling in, it just doesn’t fit the tone that a scene of that nature is meant to convey. At least in my opinion. Maybe I just associate Elfman’s music too closely with Tim ‘Hot Topic’ Burton, and his movies never move beyond ‘morbidly quirky’.
As for the cons, I feel like it’s more efficient to make a list:
- This film is was adapted from a novel known as ‘Cabal’, which was also written by Barker. In that book, I imagine the story is coherent, the plot logical and well-defined, and the audience isn’t left in the dark about what the character’s are thinking. Not so for Nightbreed, the film where no one knows anything, and the ones who might know won’t explain it. At least not in a way that really makes sense. Storywriting gold right there.
- I watched the director’s cut edition, as that was the version available on netflix, and it’s reminded me why author and editor are generally separate positions. CHRIST this is a long winded movie, 45 minutes left to go and I was actively searching for anything to do other than to continue watching, and this was literally the most action-packed section of the film. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly was a 2+ hour long movie, but it never feels like two hours have passed, because there is actually stuff going on on the screen that is interesting to watch. Maybe their is an inherent quality to the movie that’s lost between the theatrical cut and the director’s, and maybe we wouldn’t get to see as many cool monsters in the theatrical release, but as long as it didn’t feel like I was waiting for a damn bus I’d be okay with it.
- Sure there are plenty of tits in Nightbreed, but it never feels quite as gory as you would expect from a pre-CGI horror movie. Don’t get me wrong, I said the special effects are great and they are great, but it never quite hits the levels of ‘what the fuck am I looking at here’ that you got with Hellraiser. I don’t mean to blow smoke up that movie’s ass either, but c’mon, there’s a whole scene where we see a guy regenerate from a puddle of blood into a skinless freak almost step-by step. That’s something that sticks with you.
- Here’s something else that Nightbreed has in common with Event Horizon: shit characterization. Unlike EH however, where you didn’t care about the characters because they were too bland, here you don’t care about the characters because they’re one-dimensional props that feel more at home in your local internet fan fiction than in a Hollywood movie written by a famous author. Boone is the proto-Edward Cullen, Laurie’s entire existence revolves around her relationship (spoiler alert: she literally kills herself when she thinks Boone is leaving her, which is about as ‘high-school girl’ as you can fucking get), and every single cop is a violently sadistic stupid piece of shit. None of them are realistic, or at realistic as you get in horror movies, none of them act like humans would, it’s all too exaggerated and up its own ass to be relatable. It’s not that huge a leap from Hellraiser to Nightbreed admittedly, you can tell immediately that they’re written by the same guy, but Nightbreed manages to make Hellraiser look like Taxi Driver by comparison. The smaller cast probably helped in that regard. Hellraiser seems like an isolated incident in that world, in Nightbreed the world is apparently populated by extras from Troma.
With all that said, I don’t think I can recommend Nightbreed as a film you should see. Yes the special effects and costumes are great, and it’s offbeat enough that it’s probably managed to form a substantial cult following based solely on that. However, it’s also really, really dumb and really, really slow, and all the great monster designs in the world can’t cover up the fact that watching Nightbreed more of a chore than it was entertainment. If you want to give it a shot yourself then more power to you, but I think there are far darker and far better movies out there that deserve your attention than Boone’s Wacky Canadian Monster Adventures. Some of which we might even get to on this year’s Marathon, if you can believe it. I know I don’t.
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