Black Nightfall

Oh, the humanity!

There must've been a budget for this, but it must've been used for advertising! The sets are boring, akin to filming in someone's backyard with no attention to detail. The acting? Well, it's just not really. Continuity of story? Must've taken a vacation that day. Were the filmmakers ambitious? Maybe, but it was a heartless attempt to tell a story with film.

It's not Asimov's fault, rather these film-makers lacked vision.

The other reviews here I can truly say are valid, since I sat through this turkey in the theater, hoping desperately for it to get better. I mean, it had to didn't it? Alas, it never did...

Skip it, go watch the Georgio Moroder version of Metropolis again instead... Or read Issac's story, either way you'll be happier, trust me.

I actually paid money to see this in its mercifully brief theatrical release in 1988. The (tiny) audience had fun ad libbing dialogue that was much better than that provided the hapless actors. The film is bad in so many ways that it is difficult to pick out the worst element. Was it the art direction? The acting? The dialogue? The cinematography? The costumes? The plot? The editing? The music? In the end I think the worst thing is that it will probably insure that no decent film will ever be made of Asimov's "Nightfall".

The good doctor wrote that he had never seen the movie, and that he had nothing to do with it. This probably added a couple of years to Asimov's life.

I can only say that the other reviewers here at IMDb have been far too generous. This film is worse than you can imagine.

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.

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.

If you did not know the story line is about a planet surrounded by suns and knows no darkness but every couple thousand years an eclipse occurs and pure anarchy breaks out but this movie turns the story into a New Age Northern California Greek play set in the Arizona desert with people running around doing performance art.

David Birney is in this as a leader/astrologer or something that is never quite explained. Sarah Douglas is his former wife who left him for a religion or the religion's leader. Believe me you won't care. But it is nice to see her as something other than a villainess and this the only good I can say for the 'movie.' There are terrible sets, if you can call them that, terrible acting, editing, writing, and music that might have seemed advant- garde for 1979 but is just noise now

The most hilarious scene in the movie is the assassination attempt on Birney, it is something straight out of Ed Wood with the brute assassin foiled by the glare of some quartz or crystal that Birney picks up or it might be the performance art piece that the desert people put on or the performance art that the daughter does after killing someone or Douglas getting her eyes taken out by pet crows or...

If you are expecting a movie based on the Asimov story forget it but if you are a Northern Californian New Ager wondering what might have been then you might like this movie. Not Really.