Nightbeast

1982 sci-fi horror movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: An alien crashes in the woods, and some guys camping hear it. They investigate and are immediately lazered into oblivion. Who is going to stop the Nightbeast, a being impervious to bullets and seemingly unstoppable? Oh, and there's a Bad Fonzi character running around raping people. Somebody's also got to stop him.

Director Don Dohler directed The Alien Factor in 1978, but he apparently wasn't happy with it and thought he could do better. So just four years later, he remade the story as Nightbeast. If this movie actually is better, I wonder how bad The Alien Factor is. The first half of the movie is jam-packed with repetitive action scenes involving the monster shooting people and them disappearing with some graphics that look like something I could have seen while playing Atari as a kid. The spaceship scenes at the beginning were cheaply artistic. I was all ready to give the guy who played Uncle Dave the Torgo award for the year until I noticed that every single performer in this movie is almost as bad. I'm not sure I've seen a worst ensemble cast. Don Leifert played Bad Fonzi (actually, Drago) with a low-budget intensity that gave me chills, and I'm guessing, since a quick glance at his short resume shows that he only acts in movies from this same director, that he was either a good buddy of Don Dohler or they were both in some club for people named Don. And who do we get to be the big action hero who will eventually save the day? This guy:

That guy! He, by the way, only acted in one other movie--The Alien Factor. But Tom Griffith sure nailed this one, rocking that salt and pepper afro and shooting an insane amount of bullets at the monster during several scenes despite knowing that it has no effect. And to top it all off, he gets himself a sex scene! That's right. You get to see that guy's ass. If I made a top-ten list of awkward sex scenes, this would be in there somewhere. I have to give credit to Dohler for his ability to shock though. Along with that shocking sex scene, there are some pretty gruesome deaths. Well, after the thirty minutes of lazerin'. Intestines make a cameo appearance, and there's a nifty decapitation. Hell hath no fury like a rubber-faced alien scorned, I guess. If you like bad movies, this isn't a bad way to spend eighty minutes. Or three hundred and eighty minutes if you have to rewind and rewatch that sex scene a bunch of times like I did.