Straight-to-video movies are a strange phenomenon, as people such as Jean Claude Van Damme and Christopher Lambert have found out. Most of the time, they deserve their reputation, but on occasion, a movie will pop out and surprise you. A movie like Nightwatch for instance. It doesn�t follow the regular ingredients of a straight-to-video movie; the budget is often lower, thus resulting in a poorer visual quality, lacking in contrast, texture and dramatic lighting. They often use actors that are cheaper, ending up with a pile of trash. Often, the story is of a poor unimaginative standard, like it was written by a 16 year old film student who thinks Chevy Chase deserves a cabinet full of Oscars.
From the outset, you would think Nightwatch was a typical teen-slasher movie, a Scream rip-off. You�d be wrong, very wrong. The premise is that a young law student (McGregor) takes up the position of a lone hospital night watchman, just as a serial killer has begun to terrorise the city, targeting young women, raping them, and then murdering them. We follow his and his friend�s lives as the focus of the story, unaware that they will become entwined within the serial killer plot, which creeps up slowly and unexpectedly. Soon, the night watchman job loses its appeal, as victim�s bodies are brought into the morgue. Strange things start to happen during the night, and suddenly, all the clues point back to the innocent McGregor. The police are suspicious, so are his employers, friends and girlfriend (Arquette). Now life is hell as McGregor tries to prove his innocence as everyone around him becomes a suspect, even his strange best friend (Brolin).
Dark corridors, eerie silence, and tension you thought you�d forgotten since you first saw Alien. This movie screams out to be watched. It�s a crime it never made it to the cinema! It defeats the perils of typical straight-to-video that I described earlier. The visuals are rich and dynamic, with a cold and terrifying contrast for the scary bits, which come at unexpected times. The storyline is enthralling, as you try to guess �whodunnit�. There is a wonderful mixture of different themes overlapping in the movie, where it has nudity, the temptation is to make it look erotic, it doesn�t, it only adds to the uncertainty and uneasy atmosphere of the movie; the tension is handled exquisitely, with a soundtrack very underused, the real soundtrack is the haunting silence, and when the music kicks in, you know something�s coming!
The acting is superb as you�d come to expect from McGregor (playing an American very convincingly) and Nolte, with a great supporting cast including Brad Dourif, there�s even some excellent dark humour added at the best places. This is one movie I implore you to rent, or even better, buy! If you liked this movie, I would also advise you to see Summer of Sam which follows a similar trend. |
