NightBeast

Nightbeast (1982)

According to what I’ve read this is supposed to be a remake of director Don Dohler’s earlier movie Alien Factor. Since it was made only 3 years after Alien Factor I find that a bit odd, but there are many of the same characters and this is another alien running amok kind of flick, so I suppose it is true. And since I’m a big fan of Dohler’s movies I’m always down for another bit of regional drive-in cheese.

The story here has an alien spaceship colliding with an asteroid and crashing to Earth near a small town. The alien isn’t a nice guy at all and goes on a rampage as soon as he runs into anyone. Seriously in the first 10 or 15 minutes there are at least 9 deaths! Hell even after the locals manage to disarm the bulletproof alien by shooting his ray gun, he still carves them up with his claws. After ripping thru most of the locals left after the sheriff evacuates the town the survivors finally come up with an old solution and hatch a plan to electrocute the unfriendly visitor.

This is one of those movies that I find enjoyable, while at the same time acknowledging that it isn’t good in the traditional sense of the word. The movie is briskly paced and keeps the action coming. Like I’ve already said the mayhem starts early and really never lets up. This is refreshing as far too many of these low budget creature features have long slow parts between the action. Here Dohler, who also wrote Nightbeast, avoids that mistake and keeps things entertaining at all times. That said there are a lot of plot holes in the movie. For example with the body count so high where are the military? Didn’t they at least notice the space ship crashing? Oh and the monster is sort of slow so why didn’t the survivors just drive out of town? They even mention that there is nothing stopping them. And one more thing I wanted to mention is that the movie is filled with some pretty bad dialogue. In spite of this I still have fun with this one. Heck the bad dialogue is one of the things that fans of Dohler expect in his movies, so it adds to the fun. The only reason I mention this is to warn the uninitiated to what they are getting themselves into.

Of course we can’t talk about a creature feature with out a discussion of the creature. What we have here is your classic man in a rubber suit. It gets a lot of screen time and isn’t hid from the audience. I’m thinking that might not have been that great of an idea. I mean personally I’m a fan of goofy looking rubber suited monsters, but this is a pretty bad one. The mask appears to be really inflexible and the creature moves awkwardly around the sets. It really isn’t that scary, though I’m sure it was supposed to be. Again I actually like it because it is done so earnestly, but ends up being unintentionally hilarious. Why do I then sound sort of negative about it? Again I feel the need to warn you guys.

To sum things up I’m a fan of bad movies. Not the really terrible ones, but those that are entertaining. Sometimes they are fun in spite of themselves. Don Dohler might not have been the greatest director or writer ever, but the guy made some entertaining and fun flicks. If you dig drive-in movies like I do then you are going to want to check out Nightbeast.

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer