Cabal

This feels like a movie I should be very much into. I love sympathetic monsters and creatures, and strange unique fantasy lore, but this movie just falls flat for me. I've seen it twice now. I gave It a second chance with the Director's Cut, but I came away feeling the same.

I did really enjoy seeing David Cronenberg acting, and I imagine everyone on set had fun, but there's really nothing to come back to in this movie. It feels like they had written a premise, and a first act, and then just winged it for the rest of the film.

There's a decent mystery being built up in that first act, and I'm intrigued, hoping to venture further into this strange culture of Midian, but it seems that there is no actual depth to it. They're just monsters.They sit around in dusty underground lairs waiting for 'normals' to come around and shake things up, and when they do they go "boogie boogie boo" and dance in their faces.

Its been along time since I seen the original, but the directors cut seemed a vastly superior movie. The version I recently saw, as there are several out there, had a 2 hrs long running time.

Undeniably, Hellraiser was Clive Barkers best movie by far. Nightbreed has far larger sets and much more ambitious effects, as the cast is much larger. For the best part it succeeds, and is an impressive creature feature/ fantasy horror. Hellraiser just had a better, more personal, darker story to tell in my opinion. It was a hallmark in the evolution of horror in the 1980s. It was one of those movies which really touched a nerve.

Comparisons a side, this is very decent genre entry.

Boone is a man plagued by secrets and nightmares. His situation is greatly worsened when his therapist reveals his darkest deeds. With his girlfriend in tow and the therapist hot on his heels will Boone be able to find this town of monsters in his dreams and what will happen when he finds it and they find him. I've always enjoyed this film since its' release. It is a good solid monster flick with some gore and a little mythology to boot. The creature effects are even to this day some of the darkest and twisted ever seen. The directing and look of the film are solid. Translating Clive Barker's imagination is probably very hard…even by Barker himself. The acting of the leads is very good and Cronenberg (a director in his own right) is sedate and creepy. If Hopkins wasn't available to play Hannibal the cannibal I would have chose him. The main detractor is the way the studio hacked up the original cut. And poor marketing didn't help either. Please release a director's cut someone. 7/10

I always think of Clive Barker as the 20th century version of H.P. Lovecraft with added humour. This is a good monster flick, that at times is absurd, but fun. Craig Sheffer is okay in the lead, but I particularly enjoyed David Cronenberg's understated portrayal of the doctor. There's a bit of gore, but nothing remotely scary. Good movie to pass the time.

Clive Barker is, by far, the best horror writer of this century, and a fine visual artist as well. Few of the films made from his fiction are satisfactory "Clive Barker Experiences". This is partly because his main strength as a writer is, naturally, his use of language to provoke emotional reactions and to evoke very special moods above (beneath?) and beyond ordinary shock and revulsion. He raises horrific imagery and psychological situations to the level of poetry. This is not easy to do in film, a purely visual medium. The image of a monster or a monstrous act in film is a picture: there it is before you. A description of same in fiction can be given all sorts of depths and angles in the mind in writing. "Nightbreed" almost works as an adaptation of Barker's "Cabal". Unfortunately, as is apparent, most of Barker's budget was blown on the monsters (which are excellent movie monsters), with insufficient funds remaining for factors like cast. The actor who played the all-important role of Boone was not up to it at all. He conveyed almost nothing of the depth of Boone's torment, which exists on a number of levels. A talent should have been sought instead of a hunk. This is symptomatic of the film's weakness in general. Too many (albeit high-quality) monsters and too little time and attention spent on the basic human values (simply, character) which must underlie all fiction, no matter what its genre.