Nightbeast

Don Dohler MUST have grew up during the fifties/early sixties and been a tremendously big fan of the monster-movies of that period! How else could you justify the handful of cheesy Sci-Fi horror movies that he unleashed upon the world during the first half of the 1980's? His movies all revolve on the exact same storyline of an alien monster invading a remote little redneck-town and killing the locals. "Nightbeast" is by far superior to "The Galaxy Invader" and "The Alien Factor", but still a pretty inept and laughable movie. The monster, which resemblances a hairless gorilla with fangs, lands on earth, takes out his laser gun and starts shooting random people so they disappear into thin air. He occasionally also rips hillbillies' heads off or their guts out, but he never seems to attempt to take over our planet or anything. Why is he here? Nobody knows and nobody even bothers to wonder about it. Thanks to the monster's arrival, the local sheriff also realizes that he's in love with his deputy! How convenient is that? Most of the time, you get the impression that the players completely worked without a script! They all just do and say what they feel is best, and Don Dohler doesn't mind because he's happy already for making another cheesy monster movie! There's some outrageous gore and gratuitous nudity, so I don't assume any 80's horror fan will complain. Heck, even the title can't be taken seriously, as the intergalactic King Kong eliminates as many people during the day as he does at night! It's true what the other reviewer said: they just don't make 'em like this anymore.

Night Beast is actually quite an entertaining little alien movie. If you can actually find this one on home video rent it. It will entertain you for it's short running time of 80 minutes. If you enjoy low budget and obscure horror. Night Beast is perfect for you. I know I love 80's horror , and this film is just another 80's winner !!

Night Beast is actually quite an entertaining little alien movie. If you can actually find this one on home video rent it. It will entertain you for it's short running time of 80 minutes. If you enjoy low budget and obscure horror. Night Beast is perfect for you. I know I love 80's horror , and this film is just another 80's winner !!

If Ed Wood was given color film stock and a budget that was double the nearly four dollars he made his entire library on, I suspect the result would be something that looked vaguely similar to the film "Nightbeast;" wooden actors, terrible effects, confusing dialogue, and plot holes large enough to drive a semi through.

The Nightbeast is an alien with a brown head and fangs, who crash lands his space ship on earth in the opening moments of the film. He then goes on a rampage killing anyone in sight. The remainder of the movie finds our "hero," Sheriff Cinder, hunting the beast, while bedding coworkers and trudging through subplots that mean nothing to anyone in or out of the film.

This so-called Nightbeast is a fascinating creature. He arrives on earth, and begins his rampage, and throughout the film, no motive is given for the carnage, no explanation provided for his origin or his reason for coming to earth. And none of the characters seem to care, or appear at all surprised that a murderous beast with bad dental work is on the loose. They try to kill it sure, but mostly out of simple survival instinct not even fear of the alien hordes as many a paranoid horror film has shown. The Nightbeast appears primarily during the day (Maybe his name is supposed to be a post-ironic commentary on our society?) and never speaks a word of dialogue. A shame too; he seems like he has a lot on his mind.

When Nightbeast hits the town, he first has a small raygun that he uses to dissolve humans away into nothing. He is so trigger happy (And presumably his gun has unlimited ammo) that he just blasts without aiming, and there are scenes filled with literally hundreds of lasers whizzing around our not-so-intrepid heroes who fire at it with their handguns showing on their faces a mixture of extreme heroism and idiocy. Of course, we later learn that the Nightbeast (Whose one weakness is electricity...funny that it doesn't like being electrocuted, SO creative) actually uses the humans for his food, begging the question if he needs to eat us to survive, then why use a raygun that destroys all trace of the humans leaving nothing to eat?

The film includes some wife-beating subplots that go nowhere, and a sex scene painful in both the unattractive nature of the participants and in the silliness of the dialogue (Example line: "You know I could take my shirt off..." Response: "And I could take my towel off.") And what kind of women completely undresses in front of her coworker with whom she's never shared a romantic encounter with in her life? She tells him she's going to take a shower then strips right in front of the guy! Did I mention he's got a salt-and-pepper curly afro and huge seventies glasses? Yeah, he's the action hero.

Lunacy of this caliber is often hard to come by. And Nightbeast truly fits that description. It won't be easy to secure yourself a copy, but it will be well worth the effort if you can. And watch out for those stupid, big-teethed aliens. Cause you never know...

I first looked at this page and saw that it had a four rating before I had watched it, so when I started watching it, I am like this is so cool, why is the score so low? Well, unfortunately, the film slows down immensely and becomes standard low budget monster on the loose with plot points and characters that add absolutely nothing to the movie except padding. Which is a shame, because it is great when it first begins as it is nonstop action and killing which distracts one from the bad acting. When this great opening slows, you notice it way too much as you just wish the monster would hurry up and kill someone else!

So, the story has a ship in space hitting a meteor which causes it to plummet to Earth. An alien gets out and its ship explodes leaving it stranded on Earth. Instead of doing the E.T. thing of trying to phone home, this one decides, hell, I'm going to kill everyone I see! Yes, he uses a blaster to start disintegrating everyone, even children! If you get in close to him, he kills you with his hands! A sheriff tries to stop him and manages to get a person capable of shooting the monster's laser gun out of the monster's hand. It is at this point the movie goes downhill as we have to watch a character named Drago challenge the sheriff's authority and strangle a woman and the mayor of the town worrying about the governor of the state coming for a visit. The monster just appears to infrequently after the super great start so you notice that the film has horrible actors and just is not as fun anymore as that whole Drago thing went nowhere as far as having anything to do with the plot.

The first portion of the film is a highlight, and I understand that you cannot go at that fast pace for a super extended time; especially, when you have such a low budget, but save it till the end! It was so cool watching the monster just blast everyone that it is such a drastic tempo change after the monster looses his gun, I kept hoping he'd fix it and maybe blast up the party the mayor was having, but no, the monster does not show up making for a long line of scenes having nothing to do with the alien. Drago was the worst, here was one guy you want to see get ripped to shreds, and he gets killed in a normal manner.

So, this movie does start out on fire and I do find the makers did a good job with the monster on the very small budget. There are also some nice shots of the monster in the shadows looking ominous. The film slows down to a snail's pace once the monster no longer has his weapon which is a shame. Still a couple of nice kills to be seen, but nothing like the craziness that is the first 15 or so minutes. Also a warning to anyone who watches this film as it contains a sex scene that most of you will not want to see! I saw it coming and was like "NOOOO!"