I'll tell you why so serious

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Clive Barker's Nightbreed had a difficult production and an equally arduous release. The film was based on Barker's celebrated novella "Cabal," a fan favorite, and was adapted by the author himself, who also took over the directing reigns (his Hellraiser had been a hit only a few short years earlier). The ensuing marketing, release, and reaction was disastrous. First Barker's vision was re-edited and re-tooled without his consent, creating a film that felt oddly choppy and unfinished to many critics and viewers. While the plot was filled with unique characters and monsters (as well as a "the monsters are the heroes and the humans are the monsters" theme), the studio decided to market the film as typical slasher fare, pandering to the lowest common box office denominator. To Barker's horror, Nightbreed floundered in theaters and died a quiet death.Twenty five years after its initial release, Nightbreed has slowly but faithfully garnered a strong cult following. The fan base became so rabid—even starting a website called "Occupy Midian"—that a new cut of the film was created, cobbled together using old VHS quality tapes that became known as "The Cabal Cut, which was much closer to what Barker had in mind before the studio tampered with the film. Although extraordinarily rough in nature (and much longer in length), the new "Cabal Cut" was shown at various festivals to great enthusiasm from fans and even Clive Barker himself. The interest became large enough that Scream Factory, a horror offshoot of Shout Factory, decided to work with Barker and Morgan Creek to see if they could locate the missing film elements. After a lot of hard work and searching the Warner Brothers vaults (the footage had been thought to have been lost), the folks at Shout Factory were able to find the original camera negatives, and with Barker's help added nearly twenty minutes of footage to the theatrical cut thus finally offering fans a brand new look at Nightbreed: The Director's Cut the way Clive Barker had always intended.I've been a fan since I caught the film on video back in the early 1990s. There is a good reason why Nightbreed has become such a cult classic: It's a truly unique monster movie that doesn't attempt to play by the rules. While there's a lot of rubber suits and latex masks, Nightbreed separates itself from the pack by having something other than scares and violence on its mind. The core idea of the film—that the terrors living below Midian are no worse than the terrors living above in the cities—gives the film a lot more weight and meaning. The allegorical nature of the "us vs. them" theme makes the film less a scary monster movie and more a dark poem; while the monsters of Midian are physically grotesque, they only want what we want: do be left in peace to live a life of their choosing. This makes Nightbreed an especially topical film that has held up surprisingly well.The real standout is David Cronenberg as the film's secondary villain, who doesn't really act so much as stand there and look creepy in a mummy mask made of buttons and zippers. Fans of classic science fiction cinema should keep an eye out for John Agar (Tarantula, The Mole People) as a local gas station attendant who gets on the wrong side of Dr. Decker's knife.

I had seen NIGHTBREED at the time of its' release and never thought much of it. I recently finished a second viewing of the "Director's Cut" of Clive Barker's 1990 film and I find that my impressions of this movie have not changed much over the years. This is a movie that you want to love. It's Clive Barker. It has cool monster ideas and an attempt at a deep mythology. It has a creepy serial killer. It's like a checklist of horror geek wishes, but somewhere along the way it all goes wrong and the movie ends up falling flat and feeling, at times, like a bad BBC production. Clive Barker is an enigma to me. I would consider HELLRAISER to be one of my favorite horror films of all time. The horror genre is littered with the corpses, though, of directors who never matched their debut film and Barker seems to be one of those. I have found that none of his movies after after really grabbed me as being much more than average. In general movies like this tend to be great ideas with poor execution. That is true of this movie to a great degree. A self-admitted attempt at a "dark horror STAR WARS" the movie attempts to create a dense mythology full of different races and unique creations. While I have not read the novella, I would assume this idea works much better when left to imagination. It would even work great as a comic book. Barker just does not seem to have the directorial chops, though, to bring this vision to a cohesive visual experience. Even in director's cut, the movie is choppy and uneven and never creates any true sense of direction.I appreciate the attempts to bring a slew of practical effects makeup monsters to the screen. I, also, recognize the age of the movie, but some of these designs look much better than others. I guess you could say that was true of the Cenobites, as well, but I digress. For every cool Porcupine quill shooting femme fatale, there is a horrid, moon-faced oddity that looks like it would have belonged in a bad fast food commercial. We see better makeups each week on FACE/OFF than some of these creations.Another knock is the casting choices. The lead actor is not especially engaging, in my opinion. He has the requisite good looks and this would, certainly, not be the fist horror film to cast a bland attractive guy as the lead. The most egregious choice is the casting of Cronenberg as Dekker. This needed to be the anchor character at the core of this film and could have been a terrifying killer in the hands of a more adept actor, but Cronenberg comes off like every other director with "actor envy" and shows why he's better off behind the screen. He's completely flat and never hints at any true sense of malevolence. My last complaint is the odd sense of humor that seethes beneath the surface, but comes out bubbling in the finale. It's a cartoonish sense of tempering the horror with comedy and feels like bad British humor, which is essentially what it is, in the end. I have read several of Barker's works and like every one of them. The man is a wizard of ideas, with a rich imagination that is capable of conjuring vivid landscapes and rich characterizations. Unfortunately, he's shown a struggle to bring those ideas successfully to the screen and this movie is no exception.

Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) has disturbing dreams of Midian where monsters live. Psychiatrist Dr. Decker (David Cronenberg) is treating him and convinces him that he committed a series of murders. He tries to go to Midian for real and is rejected by its inhabitants. The police catches up to him outside the gates and Decker tricks the police into killing Boone. Boone is resurrected and he is accepted into Midian. His girlfriend Lori Winston tracks down Boone but she is followed by Decker who turns out to be the real monster.Clive Barker is not quite good enough to direct this. Cronenberg is competent as a villain but he would have been a far superior choice as the director. This is filled with the grotesque and weird monstrosities. Some of it is very effective gore. Narcisse slicing through his own head is amazing although other creatures are less effective. There's only so much real makeup can do and CGI is rather primitive. The movie attempts for grand horror but Barker doesn't have it in him. He is still stuck in a lot of B-movie horror tropes. The cops are too silly. There are not enough good actors for the minor roles.EDIT: Director's Cut It's been so long that I can't tell what's been added in this version. There's almost twenty minutes more. This probably flowed a bit better although it could cut down Anne Bobby's singing. Neither her nor Craig Sheffer are A-list performers. The limitations are still the same in this extended cut. I still don't see why body-horror expert Cronenberg isn't doing the directing. He's right there on set already. The creature creations are pretty good especially considering the limited budget although Midian is short-changed. It needs to be more other-worldly. The secondary acting is still B-level. This will never be better than a relatively good B-movie. I do wonder if a bigger remake could be great.

Clive Barker, did you know you wrote the story this movie is based on? How did you f*ck that up? It's your story, you own it you wrote it-surely surely SURELY when you wrote it you did not envision the film adaptation to be this movie. You did the same thing to your masterpiece The Last Illusion, you turned it into that mediocrity Lord Of Illusions. Clive, baby, what is going on? Do you hate movies, is that it? Do you hate your work? David Cronenberg was profoundly miscast, once again, Mr. Barker, did you even read your story? David f*cking Cronenberg is how you saw the character, Decker? Are you f*cking sure? Dude, Clive Barker, you are one of the all time greatest horror authors ever, f*cking class it up next time.