Nightbeast (1982) -***

     Don Dohler’s third feature film, Nightbeast, is a loose remake of his first. It’s strange that he would do such a thing so quickly, but Dohler was always a pretty strange guy. In this particular case, he seems to have had two impulses driving him. First, Dohler had made The Alien Factor for a sum that he could probably have spent at the local Lincoln-Mercury dealership without springing for the most expensive option package, at a time when he had more theoretical knowledge of the craft and trade of cinema than practical. Once he had the profits from two released films in his pockets, and the lessons from their production filed away in his brain, it was only natural for him to look back on his debut with some chagrin over the things he could have done better, or at least differently. And at the same time, the experience of selling Fiend into distribution had brought home to Dohler just how old-fashioned his movies thus far had been. The horror audience of the 1980’s expected a faster pace, more graphic violence, and even a bit of frank eroticism. Nightbeast therefore represented an attempt to modernize The Alien Factor as much as it was a technically motivated do-over. It’s readily apparent, though, that the initial go-round more accurately reflected Dohler’s own taste in monster flicks. The speed-up feels frantic rather than nimble. The gore is noticeably cruder than either the creature suit or the matte effects attendant upon the use of alien technology, in ways that suggest they didn’t really hold the director’s interest. And Dohler’s squeamishness in the two nude scenes is amusingly palpable.

     Nightbeast begins with something that The Alien Factor conspicuously lacked, an extended special effects sequence depicting the titular monster’s arrival on Earth. The alien didn’t intend to come here, to all outward appearances, but its spaceship was struck by a meteor somewhere inside lunar orbit, and the next thing the extraterrestrial pilot knew, it was coming in for a barely controlled crash landing in the woods around Perry Hall, Maryland. Wrecking its vessel on a strange planet has clearly put the creature in a mood, for its aluminized jumpsuit and disintegration pistol are the only indications that it has anything in its mind beyond a drive to senseless violence. It incinerates the trio of hunters on an overnight campout who are the most direct witnesses to its landfall. It vaporizes a rather hapless father driving heaven knows where at this hour of the night with his two tween children, then zaps the kids and the station wagon for good measure. And it visits a more hands-on death upon the couple at the nearest house to its landing site, disemboweling the guy and decapitating the girl. All this without any discernable provocation from the victims, or any discernable attempt at communication on the alien’s part!

     The subsequent explosion of the downed spacecraft draws the attention of Sheriff Jack Cinder (Tom Griffith, who like most of the cast is reprising his Alien Factor role) and his uniformed deputies, Pete (Richard Geiwicz) and Lisa Kent (Karin Kardian). Cinder has Pete round up a posse before going to investigate, despite the inconvenient hour, leading to a veritable hecatomb of interchangeable 30-something guys with beards, trucker caps, and flannel vests. The authorities sensibly withdraw at that point, and wait for dawn to go back onto the offensive. With the sun up, you see, there’s a chance that an elderly marksman called Bill Perkins (Bump Roberts— surely the most fabulous old coot name of all time) will be able to get a clean shot at the invader’s raygun. Perkins does indeed come through, evening the odds considerably— although his son (another director cameo from Dohler) dies in the morning’s skirmish. Now it’s the monster’s turn to slip away into hiding.

     Soon thereafter, Cinder and Kent go to see Mayor Bert Wicker (Dick Dyszel once again) in the hope that his upstream political connections can get Perry Hall some help from the state government. Now you might think the sheriff would be positively thrilled to catch Wicker in the midst of an electoral schmoozing party around his backyard pool, attended by no less a personage than Governor Embrey (Richard Ruxton, from Curse of the Cannibal Confederates and Alien Factor 2: The Alien Rampage) himself. Perfect opportunity to get the Maryland National Guard called into action on the town’s behalf, right? Dohler seems not to understand that governor is a state-level office, however, because Cinder spends the whole of the ensuing scene trying to shoo Embrey and his hangers-on out of Perry Hall while simultaneously haranguing Wicker to get him some help from “the state.” In the end, it takes a cock-and-bull story about toxic gas seeping up from a disused mine in the forest to send the partygoers on their way, and Cinder exasperatedly leaves the distraught mayor drinking himself stupid in company with his amorous secretary, Mary Jane Carter (Eleanor Herman, whose parents evidently didn’t come out to make sure she hadn’t been cast in some sleaze epic without their knowledge this time around).

     Drunk mayors and rampaging aliens incredibly don’t complete the list of Perry Hall’s problems this day, either. Also on the loose is a psychopathic biker called Drago (Don Leifert, who alone among the Alien Factor holdovers is returning as a different character), who has long been something of a nemesis to Sheriff Cinder. One of the few newly deputized men to survive both encounters with the space monster, a fellow by the name of Jamie Lambert (Jamie Zemarel), recently started seeing Drago’s ex-girlfriend, Suzie (Monica Neff). Naturally, Drago has no intention of accepting himself as an ex-anything, and he swings by Suzie’s place to bully her into taking him back just as Lambert is leaving it, having alerted her that Perry Hall is being evacuated. You can imagine how the bastard takes it when he finds “his” girl packing a bug-out bag immediately after a visit from some other guy. Drago strangles Suzie to death, then spends the rest of the movie seeking vengeance against Lambert, Cinder, and the world in general.

     Meanwhile, the alien finds its way to the home and clinic of Dr. Ruth Sherman (Anne Frith again) and her nephew, Dr. Steven Price (still George Stover). After butchering its way through Sherman’s patients, it chases the doctors into their cluttered maze of a basement, where they’re able to keep out of sight long enough for Steven to devise an ingenious counterattack. With a bucket, the utility sink, and the direct current power line for the washing machine, Price rigs up an electrocution trap, and thereby becomes the first human to inflict actual injury on the invader. With more voltage behind it, something similar might conceivably be able to kill the thing, although Price is at a loss for the moment to imagine where more voltage might come from in this little town. Nevertheless, it’s something to remember in the event that Ruth and Steven should live long enough to see Sheriff Cinder again.

     If we take Don Dohler’s objective in making Nightbeast to have been “The Alien Factor, but more marketably trashy,” then I’d say mission accomplished. The gravest sin of Dohler’s debut was a lethargically ambling pace imparted by the need to pad out an already unhurried film to releasable length. Mind you, there was some off-kilter appeal in the way he did that, contributing to the sense one gets while watching of being mildly, unaccountably stoned, but The Alien Factor’s sloth is nevertheless an obstacle to ordinary enjoyment. Nightbeast does not have that problem. From the meteor strike at the end of the opening credits until the alien is disarmed by Bill Perkins, the film proceeds at a breathless, headlong gallop— just nonstop action, violence, and bloodshed. And because that phase of the film features all manner of special effects that Dohler had been unable to use previously, whether for financial reasons or because he hadn’t yet managed to attract into his orbit anyone who knew how to create them effectively, it’s nonstop spectacle as well. Nightbeast even has a full-scale spaceship prop getting blown up for real! After all that, it comes as something of a relief when the movie settles down a bit for the second act. Even then, though, you can still see Dohler taking to heart the advice he’d received from several quarters to play it sleazy. Drago, for example, is a very 42nd Street sort of villain, even if he does stop short of raping any of the women he attacks over the course of the film. Once the alien is deprived of its disintegration pistol, its depredations on the people of Perry Hall become savage indeed, however clumsy the gore makeup employed during them. And then there’s the sex scene…

     I don’t think I’ve ever so thoroughly enjoyed such a lousy bit of cinematic hanky-panky in my life. What happens is unremarkable on the surface: Deputy Kent has always had a thing for Sheriff Cinder, and the attraction becomes mutual under the pressure of fighting for both their lives and the survival of their town. Think Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor in The Terminator, but with the gender valence inverted. What you have to understand, though, is that Dohler didn’t want to film that scene. Having Suzie strip all the way naked while changing her clothes before skipping town was one thing, but to film full-on simulated intimacy, with the level of detail expected of R-rated movies in the early 1980’s, was leagues outside of Dohler’s comfort zone. He didn’t believe in the sequence, he didn’t know how to write it, and only the recognition that having such a scene would make Nightbeast orders of magnitude easier to sell to a distributor could make him even consider going through with it. You know who absolutely did want to shoot that scene, though? Tom Griffith. Don’t ask me why, but Griffith was downright gung ho about having his 55th-percentile body immortalized in all its naked mediocrity. I need you to picture this guy. Fairly handsome in the face, but with scrawny limbs, pasty skin, the merest beginning of a middle-age potbelly, and not the slightest externally visible evidence of muscle tone. Throw in on top of that the perfect 1970’s cop-show moustache and a mane of prematurely gray hair permed into a springy sphere of magnificent honky Jheri curls. Now imagine him in bed with a blonde who looks like the director’s aunt’s hairdresser (which is in fact what Karin Kardian was in her day job), and entrust the filming of their tryst to a guy who would rather hit himself in the nuts with a crab mallet. I’ve never seen anything like this combination of profound discomfort and eager exhibitionism before, and I expect it’ll be a long time before I see anything like it again.

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