‘If you have the guts – he wants them!!’
NightBeast is a 1982 sci-fi horror film about a creature from outer space that crash lands near a small town and starts killing people.
The movie was written and directed by Baltimore-based Don Dohler (Blood Massacre; The Galaxy Invader; Fiend). It is a partial remake of his first film The Alien Factor. Also known as Night Beast
The movie stars Donald Leifert, Tom Griffiths and George Stover. (Night of the Living Dead: Genesis; Camp Blood 666; Frames of Fear; Call-Girl of Cthulhu; Vampire Sisters; The Galaxy Invader; The Alien Factor and many, many more).
Most of the cast of The Alien Factor reprise their roles in Nightbeast. It features opening credit effects by Ernest D. Farino (who later created the title effects for The Terminator, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) and the creature was created by John Dods who later provided special effects for Ghostbusters II, Alien Resurrection, and The X Files. Additional makeup effects were by Amodio Giordano. Parts of the synth score were written by future Star Trek and Star Wars director J.J. Abrams when he was just sixteen years old.
Plot [contains spoilers]:
A small alien spaceship is cruising around the Solar System. When it reaches the vicinity of Earth, it is struck by an asteroid and crashes at night in the small town of Perry Hall. Some hunters hear the impact and alert the county sheriff, Cinder. When they go investigating on their own, however, the pilot emerges and kills them with a disintegrator ray. The beast also attacks a couple in their home and a family out for a drive.
Cinder confronts the beast with his men and some armed residents including a man named Jamie. However, the beast appears invulnerable to bullets and they lose many men to the disintegrator. The next morning, they enlist the help of an expert marksman who shoots off the disintegrator, disarming the beast. However, the marksman’s son and another officer perish during the shootout.
The police department begins evacuating the town. However, they are unable to convince Mayor Bert Wicker to cancel his party for Governor Embry. Meanwhile, a delinquent named Drago abuses his girlfriend, who has been sleeping with Jamie. The police then arrive to give her the evacuation order, and after they leave, Drago returns and strangles the girl. When Cinder’s police find out that Wicker’s party is in progress, Jamie bluffs that poison gas is escaping from a nearby mine and the partygoers flee in panic. Wicker and his secretary Mary Jane, dispirited by this turn of events, stay home and begin drinking heavily.
At the office of Doctor Steven Price, the beast appears and kills a few men. Price and Nurse Ruth hide in the basement, and devise a trap to electrocute the beast with some frayed electrical cord. It works, and the beast flees the building. The body of Drago’s girl gets discovered and taken to Price; Jamie, suspecting Drago, goes out on his dirt bike and beats him. Soon after, Cinder and his deputy Lisa discover a mutilated corpse, and the beast shows up. Lisa and Cinder make their escape, and the sheriff injures his leg in the process. Lisa takes him to her house to heal, and they get frisky.
Meanwhile, Wicker and Mary Jane have gotten very drunk. Price is sent to watch over them until they can be evacuated. However, the beast gets past Price and kills Mary Jane in the basement. Her screams wake Wicker, and the beast rips his head off when he investigates. Cinder arrives afterwards, and Jamie suggests electrocuting the beast with a high-voltage coil from the local power plant. Price, thinking back to his success with the electrical trap, supports this course of action, and the sheriff drives out to the power plant with his men. There, Drago assaults Lisa and Cinder but is stopped when Jamie shoots him with a shotgun.
Cinder and his crew return to Wicker’s house and begin setting up their trap, laying metal wire between the trees and connecting it to the coil, which will discharge when they throw the circuit breakers. The beast takes them by surprise, and Jamie must hold onto the wire to keep it inside the trap. They throw the breakers, and the surge makes the beast explode and takes Jamie with it as well. The stars overhead are shown…
Reviews [click links to read more]:
“The film suffers from the usual shortcomings of this kind of regional, semi-amateur film-making: cliches, poor special effects, wooden acting, and the kind of script where “Holy shit!” is considered witty, Oscar Wilde-esque dialogue […] Still, Nightbeast does have its entertaining aspects.” And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
” …a hoot from start to finish. The script was ultra-basic, the dialogue and acting uniformly atrocious, the photography amateur, and the direction pedestrian. However, it does feature a cool alien, lots of daft moments and unintentional (and intentional) humour.” Blueprint: Review
“While the film is no Night of the Creeps (hell, it’s not even The Deadly Spawn), Nightbeast has its charms. As to what those charms are exactly, I have no idea. Actually, the title of the documentary about the career of Don Dohler sums up these charms quite well: Blood, Boobs and Beast. Check out if you get the chance, it’s a pretty good doc.” House of Self-Indulgence
“If you’re looking for a serious sci-fi movie, you’d be looking in the wrong place with Nightbeast. If you’re looking for cheesy, schlocky, consistently low budget special effects and a montage of gunfire, then you can’t go wrong here.” Internal Bleeding
“It entertained me and it didn’t outstay its welcome, to expect anything else of the movie would have been foolish. It’s far from a classic, it isn’t even very coherent, but with a just few thousand dollars Dohler made a movie that was much more entertaining and enjoyable than a lot of $100 million sci-fi movies I’ve seen.” To Obscurity and Beyond
“Naturally, this is the sort of affair that is a laff riot to those viewers in a certain frame of mind, with all its grottiness and cheapness and ideas above its station, even though those ideas were to make a more violent version of a fifties sci-fi invasion effort which were not exactly ambitious, but Dohler insisted on throwing in bits of business he felt proper movies should have, no matter how out of place they were.” The Spinning Image
“Well Nightbeast is probably not going to change your life, but if you are in a serious need of some real 80s entertainment of the weird kind, you can’t go wrong with Nightbeast, cause they don’t make em’ like this anymore.” Hog-Wild Howls
“Although the special effects (including some startling uses of gore makeup) are noteworthy, the actors aren’t given much to do other than stand around and talk. The final result is disappointing.” TV Guide
“Although the movie focuses on the gory kill scenes with glee, it’s not gory enough to be a splatter movie, it’s not campy enough to be funny and it’s not strange enough to be entertaining.” The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre
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