Nightstalker

Nightstalker (2009)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Lommel's ongoing saga of doing a film about every famous serial killer continues with this look at the Night Stalker who haunted California during the 1980's and is still sitting on Death Row there today. Adolph Cortez does a decent job at playing the nutcase who walks around stalking men and women while playing with a sucker in his mouth. We learn this is due to a deal with Satan and because he saw his uncle shoot his aunt. Whatever the case, this is the eleventh film in this series that I've seen and while this one here is among the better ones, I still can't help but get bored because we've seen this thing one time too many. Once again we get a crazy guy walking around and talking to himself. Lommel has used this same set up during several of this serial killer pictures and I really wish he would at least try to do something different with it because all of the eleven films just bleed together to the point where I really couldn't tell one from another. I doubt many people outside myself are going to bother going through everyone of these films but those who do attempt it are going to have deja vu all over the place. Once again this is done on video and once again the budget is extremely low even though this one here features more blood than any of the previous ones. The gunshots are extremely fake looking but I guess the producers tried to make up for this by using a gallon of blood on each shot. The film starts off mildly entertaining but it quickly gets tiresome as we have to keep watching the same thing happen over and over.

This has to be the worst movie I have ever seen. Pornos have better acting!

I have been obsessed with Richard Ramirez from the time his story came out. I was a teenager in the 80s when the world learned of his killings. I have read every book and watched everything that involved him. I know as much about him as a person can. This movie veers off the story line of Richards life completely. The actor tries but only as much as the script allows him. I felt bad for him trying to carry this movie alone but he's only allowed to do what the writer wants or let someone else have the job. Richard was not like this movie in any way. I don't know where this person came up with all this but it was not following Richard Ramirez. Do yourself a favor and skip this. Lou Diamond Phillips does a very convincing job as Richard. No one will ever be like Richard but he's as good as we have now. I have never heard of Richard sucking on blow pops constantly what about breaking into houses at night and raping women ? This movie is a joke. He came out at night stole cars took drugs and killed people he didn't follow girls in parks. I wish I could make a movie and when I called it the Nightstalker people would know I had done my homework on the man.

Another graduate student production shot on video. Very tireless and one of those 'when will this end' type of film. View the first chapter. Then the last chapter. You missed nothing. Except 10 minutes of your time. A psycho drama about Rodriguez the stalker in LA that tries to relate it to his early childhood upbringing and the usual satanic abuse. You learn nothing here, except over acting, poor special effects, lack luster direction, and a hastily written script. But realizing that you might learn something. The killer seems to be doing the same thing every time with 'explaing' of his psychosis through flashbacks of his early childhood and how his father killed a few women in front of him causing a traumatic influence on his behavior. Not very original and poorly executed. A few hot babes tho. And one that doesn't seem to mind being followed by a psycho killer. I mean really. She did have a hot outfit on tho, I'll give her that. Didn't she get the message when she saw him sucking on lollipops all day. Get a clue.

This is a pretty monotonous and factually inaccurate portrait of Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. The Night Stalker, the serial killer and self-proclaimed Satanist who terrorised Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1980s. It offers little characterisation, next to no story, no suspense and lots of badly executed violence. Most of the short running time is filled with Richard's repetitious bad-beat-poetry voice-over of a soundtrack ('She was my dark Princess. Dark like hell. Darker than night, my Satanic queen, she was so dark..' etc) plus endless close-ups of him sucking suggestively on a lollipop.

What the film does have going for it is difference - the style and delivery are significantly unlike those of the majority of straight to DVD horror films. This doesn't save it from being a real chore to sit through, but seems worth commenting on in these times when so many films are bad in exactly the same way as each other.

The grainy video cinematography and no-budget location shooting give the film a gritty sense of place. Richard's voice-over seems designed to fill the void where a recording of the outdoor location sound would normally be. It looks like they only bothered to record sound when it wouldn't be blotted out by traffic and the din of the world - i.e. mostly when they were indoors.

This is actually a pretty good film for the actors when they are able to snatch any screen time away from Richard and his lollipops. It looks like the performers were allowed to improvise nearly all of their conversations. When this works, it gives the scenes a ring of non-movie reality. Of course when it doesn't, the actors end up riffing the same ideas repeatedly.

The Night Stalker was called the Night Stalker because he attacked people at night. Well, he goes in for a lot of daytime attacks in this film. Very few of the crimes match up to the real case history, the scene in which he is apprehended is abysmally directed, you never see how he gets into any of the victims' houses, and there is no real illumination of the man, either real or imaginary. I would have settled for either.

I didn't stop watching this film, but I wouldn't recommend that you start. It's also not a good sign that the film's opening and closing credits take up one eighth of the running time ... but then again, the actors in this film did get a very good deal. They got to improvise, and everyone's name was displayed twice.