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Oh hey look! It's a movie by Clive Barker! The person who brought us Candyman, the movie where a ghost comes and kills people who explicitly ask this ghost to come and kill them. Not to mention Hellraiser, which is the same thing except with S&M in place of death. Plus there's some involvement by David "body horror" Cronenberg! So, why am I about to watch Nightbreed? Because it comes on the recommendation of someone who knows my taste in these sorts of thing... and also knows I'm doing these things.
OK, we start out with the name of the movie acting as a window to snakes on a hippy and snake demons and regular demons and all sorts of other random imagery. Then we cut to an inca looking mural wall showing lots of skulls and demons and such, with lots of snakes and spiders and such crawling all over it. Oh, and we also have confirmation that Danny Elfman did the soundtrack here, which was already kinda obvious due to all the Danny Elfman music playing. Suddenly, we have... whatever that was. Apparently it was the main character's dream, but we've got some random girl running through a foggy place towards a gate, being chased by... pursuers. We've got some sort of wereporcupine and a lumpy headed gal and this blue skinned demon who totally does not look like he belongs in a horror movie. He just gives off this Jim Carey, wacky recurring RPG mini-boss squad sorta vibe. Anyway, without really getting into why our presumed hero was dreaming about such weird character designs, it's off to somewhere else!
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Here we have some little kid talking to his less than attractive mother about hearing a "bad man" and.... for a second I thought the toy he left on the floor looked like Doraemon. Anyway, the bad man in question comes out with a knife and slashes up mom, then also goes and slits dad's throat while he's too busy watching sports to hear all the gruesome murdering. Then he starts off towards the kid and we cut away to the main character talking to his psychologist, Dr. Cronenberg. Now, the thing that really strikes me about this is how Bad Man looks kinda like a Tuskan Raider wearing street clothes. Oh, and Dr. C apparently believes him to be our main character here wearing a really odd mask, what with having kinda confessed to doing it thinking it was a dream. So, he gets some pills, which turn out to actually be high grade hallucinogens because turns out Dr. C is a jerk. This leads to our hero being hit by a truck. This is another one of those movies that has really weird pacing and the scene abruptly changes every minute or so.
Anyway, in the uh... mental hospital I guess he meets some crazy dude who, arbitrarily, seems to share his exact same odd little personal mythology where dead bad people become demons who either live in or try to escape to some magical fairy land called Midian, which I guess was the deal with his funky dream. Crazy offers to take him there because, hey, apparently it's a pretty cool place, but first he's going to have to cut his face off to reveal his true form. Turns out though that Crazy isn't really some magical fairy in disguise though, and he just kinda ends up flaying his own head for no good reason. Our hero, who I really wish I had something better to call him, takes this time to escape, and drive off to uh... Oz? Seriously, he just got in a pickup truck, and drove down a winding country road to this big magical looking place with a big gate out front. Oh. Turns out it's just a really cool looking graveyard I guess ... with a ruined castle in it? Then he passes out, and is awoken by a cute little puppy licking his face.
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The puppy apparently belongs to some kinda crazy hippie who wants to be an injun. Also demons live here. So... yeah, apparently Demon Narnia is real, and, I guess somewhere in upstate New York. Anyway, a demon with dread tentacles explains that no, he actually shouldn't come to live in Narnia with them because he hasn't actually ever killed anyone. Then he tries to eat him, but moon-headed demon goes "dude that isn't cool man" and helps him make a run for it. At which point he's found by the cops and Dr. C, who at this point we can pretty safely assume is secretly Bad Man and is framing patients for his random murder sprees. Dr. C shouts "He's got a gun!" so the cops totally blow him away, then notice hey, no he didn't! Dr. C kinda goes my bad, but our main character is now dead. Well, that was a short movie! Hope you enjoyed my thoughts on it!
Oh fine. I guess either having been bit by a demon, or dying a foot away from the gates of Narnia, our hero gets to come back from the dead and escape the morgue. We then cut to Dr. C listening to a recording of a session with the main character in what I can only describe as his evil lair. He's got this big long table covered in knives and giant columns of bubbling glowing red liquid behind him. Meanwhile his wife goes investigating things, in... huh. OK, apparently there's an actual town called Midian here. So we're literally saying magical monsters live in the next town over. Huh.
Cut to the properly magical looking graveyard or whatever the heck it is, where the main character, crazy (now with way less skin on his head) and really a whole big wad of weird looking people are throwing a welcome party for him. Moon face is acting as his sponsor in joining the magical weirdo club. Now, honestly speaking, at this point it would seem this isn't really a weird visually creative dreamlike horror movie at all! This is a flat out fantasy movie disguised as horror! Seriously, the vibe here is so much more Never-Ending Story than Evil Dead.
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Anyway, Wifey gets a ride from a friend to Narnia to poke around. Seriously, this is a really nice looking grave yard. Kinda has a Shadow of the Colossus vibe to it. Friend runs afoul of Dr. C so that probably won't end well, but inside, Wifey helps someone out with this.... odd situation. OK, apparently this demon land lady's kid likes to play outside, but sunlight is bad for these people. In that it caused this lady's little girl to turn into this weird little nude sickly kitten-gollum thing. Bringing her back inside fixes her back up into cute little kid mode though. The leader of the group begrudgingly gives her permission to come in and look for her husband, but she pretty much immediately runs into enough crazy demon folk to go all "yeah OK leaving now!" Unfortunately, Friend is now quite quite dead.
Long story short, the main character, who a screaming Midian Elder finally clues me in to being named "BOOOOOOOOOON!" runs Dr. C off before he can murder his wife who by now has fainted. This involves monstering out a bit, but he still looks way too normal. Oh, and here's one of the crazier transitions ever. We go from Dr. C pumping Ol' Zeke for information then presumably killing him, to a random cute little kitten... in a made of freaky skulls carved out of the walls, with Wifey lying in a coffin getting some exposition dropped on her. The short version is, this place is a refugee camp for various supernatural creatures of all sorts, who have been pretty well hunted to extinction. Wifey actually agrees without needing any real convincing that yeah, humans just kinda totally suck and are jerks and mourns all the dead freaks.
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Now, I haven't mentioned this yet, but a huge percentage of the dialog in this movie ends with "you can't. It's the law!" Apparently this is really just this crazy rigid sort of society on paper, but they seem really easy going in practice. Also, we've pretty much officially just transitioned into a live action Nightmare Before Christmas at this point. Just this crazy montage of various underground freaks. Oh, and it also seems that just about everyone who lives around Narnia is in on this whole scene, but are generally cool about it. Oh hey, I think hippie injun might actually be wearing a necklace of chicken heads. Anyway, this long montage of crazy weirdos finally ends with Wifey finding Boon and convincing him to come back home, rather than stay here in crazy monster Narnia. It takes some convincing though, because he apparently finds the place quite groovy.
It also doesn't hurt that he's kinda been framed for a bunch of murders at this point so he's pretty much arrested and tossed into a cramped little cell more or less immediately. Giving him a standard medical exam, the cops discover that huh. Turns out he's an undead freak. They take that revelation surprisingly well, and send some dudes out to Narnia to see what else is up. At this point we veer pretty well immediately into heavy handed prejudice story land. Hippy Injun gets dragged into the sun and explodes, meanwhile crazy and the lady with the cat-kid steel a car and go running off to break Boon out of jail. Oh, and then the cops go and collect an army of bible and shotgun toting rednecks to declare war on Narnia. In the ensuing fight scene, Crazy scores himself some much needed coolness points because he's kinda been coming off as a bit of a sleazy jerk. Also, the aforementioned lady who has no real distinctive qualities besides a romanian accent and the cat-kid she didn't bring along for some reason advances on some cops guarding his cell naked, because apparently this movie got confused and thought this was paragraph three. Seriously, I can't think of any reason for her to be naked here beyond just arbitrarily having a token topless scene tossed into the movie. She just walks up to a couple people and knocks them out, and that's it. Maybe it's just to distract them?
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Meanwhile, back in Narnia, apparently Dr. C finds the whole murderous police raid boring, so he pulls the head cop aside and kills him. The other cops are all busy laying out dynamite to blow Narnia the hell up. Of course, by this point the sun is up so people can come out and properly defend themselves. Of course, we also have a giant underground city taking some structural damage, so various cars and people are falling through holes in fairly deadly fashion. Anyway, big chaotic fight scene between rednecks and freaks while everything is on fire. Oh and for some reason there's this random priest running around trying to tell the cops that killing kids is wrong. I believe he was in the prison earlier too, apparently for being gay to go by how the cop dismisses him. Uh-oh! I think you might have just accidentally let slip what we're doing an odd metaphor about!
So, we have a little more random nudity, semi-justified with the wereporcupine since it's easier to shoot spines at people when you don't have your shirt on, but the real turning point here is when Boon remembers, hey, don't we have a whole bunch of giant monster freaks locked up in the basement we call the Berserkers for obvious reasons? Let's let those guys out. So... cops are rednecks are no longer much of an issue, and we can concentrate on having a proper fight between Boon and Dr. C. Dr. C runs Boon through with a sword, but he's kind of immortal and all, apparently due to dread-tentacle demon biting him way back when. So, he just turns around and gives him a hug, thus impaling him on the same sword. Ha-ha! So anyway, things largely wrapped up, Boon heads down to the bottom of the city for a chat with the 16-bit RPG end boss who founded the place. He says OK, this was kind of inevitable, but you DID kinda cause our whole civilization here to be destroyed, so it's your job to found the next one somewhere. Seems fair. As the next scene starts though, it would seem he decided to take the easy way out, because we just have all the surviving weirdos hanging out in a barn and Boon waving goodbye. Seriously, I hope that's just temporary.
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Now we... apparently end the movie with this rather odd scene. OK, the corpse of Dr. C is kinda strapped to a big stone cross all Jesus style. Then the random priest there, who at one point wandered down into the basement and spilled some... unholy water I guess all over his face, making him kinda freaky looking, is kinda crazy and worshipping Dr. C and saying he wants vengeance on them (which is silly because that was totally his own fault), so he splashes some unholy water into his chest wound there and brings him back to life to set up a sequel I'm fairly sure we don't have.
That was actually pretty darn enjoyable. Not sure how much of that comes through on this end since, well, it's mainly a case of this being one of those movies where special effects people just totally cut loose for two hours. I miss the days when you could do that and call it a movie. I really do. Anyway yeah. The point has been made to me. While Clive Barker IS responsible for some of the most pointless horror movies ever, he can also do weird dark fantasy stuff that's worthy of some attention. Mainly in book for apparently. I'll have to poke around for stuff next time I hit the Book Barn.
