Black Nightfall

Everything about this film is bad: a pathetic adaptation, a boring screenplay, absurd sets, a soundtrack that is worse than my dog's barking and acting that can only be described as perpetrated.

There is not one single redeeming quality in it, and it is completely useless except maybe as a textbook example of how NOT to make a movie.

Bad as it is on its own, it is all the more painful if you are familiar with Isaac Asimov's classic short story, on which this absurdity is allegedly based - even though any similarity... no, there are no similarities.

If IMDb allowed negative scores this film would deserve one. A chimpanzee with a home video camera could (and would) have made a better film than this on the first try. Just skip this junk.

And my summary line sums up this movie. This is easily one of the worst adaptations I have ever heard of.

What was so hard about trying to actually stick with Asimov's classic story? Did they think it would be boring? What they created is not simply boring, it's virtually incoherent as well.

In the world of science fiction, the long night has, metaphorically, always been with us. This film is a Black Hole that extinguishes the light of the original tale, sucks it in and imprisons it.

The temptation to quote the comic shop guy on 'The Simpsons' and leave my entire review at "Worst movie ever" is tremendous, but there *have* been worse movies than this inept and insulting version of one of the masterworks of science fiction.

Not very many, though.

I can only assume that Mayersberg came up with this version based on no more than a one-line plot summary of Isaac Asimov's classic short story. It's inconceivable that he actually *read* it, given what he put on film.

The resemblance to Asimov's original 'Nightfall' is limited, and strictly, to the fact that this culture hasn't experienced a sunset. Other than that, he has taken off on a tangent that, had Asimov written it himself, would have immediately been ripped from the typewriter and consigned to the trashbin.

My experience with this film was even worse, being the great Asimov fan that I am. Had the tape I watched not been a rental, I would have taken it out into the street and run over it several times, ground what remained into a powder, and burned it before it could hurt anyone else. Alas, I had to return it to the video store, there to sit quietly and innocently on the shelf, awaiting its chance to cruelly crush the hopes of a subsequent SF fan.

This movie should only be rented if you're holding an MST3K night and want something suitable for riffing. Otherwise, save yourself the money. It ain't worth it.

Somewhere . . . somehow . . . one of the finest short SF stories ever to be penned was brutally transmorgrified into a mishmosh of New Age symbolism heavily overlaid with bad acting. Asimov's original story was a well crafted tale of slowly consuming fear over a natural event. Mayersberg's film version by rights should have been a major genre event. Instead we find veteran character actors such as Sarah Douglas and Alexis Kanner (who should've known better) trying to shore up one of the worst David Birney performances ever filmed. Only two things can be recommended about this film: an interesting poster, and the fact that it was filmed in and around Paolo Soleri's "Arcosanti" architectural project out in Arizona.

There may be worse films, but I've never seen them. When I saw this movie in the theater the ticket seller actually warned me that a lot of people didn't like it and that I could have my money back if I left in the first 15 minutes.

Unfortunately I watched the whole thing, thinking to myself that it just *had* to get better. It didn't.

The only way that I'd watch this movie again is if my other choice was bamboo under the finger nails.