Nightbreed

1990 movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A guy who might be a serial killer is drawn to a mysterious Midian, a cemetery where a bunch of monsters--the titular monsters, actually--hang out for reasons that aren't fully explained.

I'd never seen this before, and I'm not sure whether or not my understanding--more accurate, a complete lack of understanding--is typical or yet another example of how I'm not smart enough to watch most movies. To me, this movie didn't make any fucking sense. This story's loose ends piled on top of more loose ends. There's a drawer in a chest over there where my wife puts all orphaned electronic things or cords that have been left around. And I don't know how it happens, but those things just get all tangled up. It's like elves snuck in there just to mess with us or there was some kind of electronics orgy. And that's what this movie is--an orgy of ideas. It's unmistakably creative, and even if the story or its characters aren't working at all, it's hard not to enjoy the amount of ideas that Clive Barker is splashing on the screen. It's the sort of movie that you watch and have to call a complete failure--a failure in storytelling, a financial failure, a critical failure--but still appreciate because it's enormously entertaining from beginning to end. A lot of that is Danny Elfman's vivacious score. You know you're in for something different from the opening scene, a scene with a porcupine woman, a horned guy, lots of weeds, and shaky cam before shaky cam was even cool, all accompanied by a cacophony of Elfman strings, orchestra, and la-la-la vocals at their most boisterous. Exhilarating stuff, and the movie almost maintains this momentum until the very end, never really getting boring until a giant climactic battle scene that isn't supposed to be boring but kind of is because it seems to go on forever. The variety of creatures Barker and his special effects wizards create in this is inspiring. You just picture Barker as this pimple-faced little snot sitting in his math class and sketching all of these guys, and watching his imagination come to life on the screen really is something to see. There's a trip through subterranean Midian in this that just blows your mind with the sheer amount of imagination that went into things. As I said, that amount of imagination can lead to something really messy, and that's definitely the case here since this doesn't make any fucking sense. You can definitely understand how this sort of thing would attract the attention of David Cronenberg who plays a psychologist and a masked villain who reminds me of the guy in Timecrimes. I don't believe I've seen Cronenberg in anything other than the cameos he has in his own movies, but I liked what he did here, a soft-spoken bundle of creepy and underdeveloped mystery. John Agar also does a nice job as a gas station owner.

Alejandro Jodorowsky apparently thinks this movie is about homosexuality. I didn't catch that at all. Of course, it's hard to find a subtext when you don't even really understand what's happening on the surface.