Nightbreed (1990)

Episode 448, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, we come to another request. It is about time, and so as we always do, we put out a few movies that have been requested and added to our long standing request list to our patrons. Give them a poll and say, which of these three movies would you like us to do? And I thought it was leading in one direction for a while, and then, uh, at the last minute took a sharp turn.

And gosh, this might be one of our most participated polls ever. And overwhelmingly, everyone wanted us to do Clive Barker’s 1990 “Night Breed”, which had been requested by one of our listeners, Harry. Harry, who’s also a sports podcaster and an author, and I believe it was on Facebook or maybe it was on our patron page, that he had reached out and asked if we could do that or Midnight Meat Train.

And so, uh, yeah, we’re doing night breed. Thanks to him and the votes of our patrons, and it’s cool because neither Craig nor I had seen Nightbreed, oddly enough, even though I think it was in our faces all the time, right? I mean, you know, see it in the video store all the time. It’s a Clive Barker thing.

But as I started looking into it, I thought, wow, we’re, it feels like we’re biting off a lot by doing this movie much more than I realized because this film has a very storied history that stretches well into the two thousands, even with different versions that have come out. This is another one of those classic movies that Clive Barker, who was writer director of it, was based on his novella, really had grand ambitions and was given control, and then at the end of it all, the studio rested control back away from him and decided to put out a cut that he was not happy with.

That apparently most people involved were not happy with, didn’t really know what to do with the movie, didn’t really understand it. Marketed it as a totally different film, really, and that might be a big reason. You know, just audience expectations, why it was really a critical and commercial failure. At the time, it was released to theaters in 1990 and turned Clive Barker off of filmmaking for quite a while after that.

And so later in the two thousands, I think it was 2014, some people got a hold of footage that he thought thought was lost or misplaced or not in good shape or whatnot, and worked with him and they put together a director’s cut. They basically went with an old print of the film. One of the earlier prints of the film that they had had, that he had cut together and that this reflects, he said at the time, he said, this reflects my original vision.

This is the movie I wanted everybody to see. So I said to Craig, since we are in a unique situation here, why don’t we do something I don’t think we’ve ever done before? How do you feel about watching First the theatrical cut and then the director’s cut so that we can really go in all eyes open and fully compare these as though we were people who at the time had seen it in the theater and then later on caught the original director’s vision and we’ll have a lot to talk about comparing and contrasting, and you were up for it.

We had some extra time and so we did it. There is also, by the way, full disclosure, a third cut out there called the cabal cut, which is like three hours long and over three hours. Yeah. Hey, nobody got time for that, least of which Craig and I who were very, very interested in movies that are 90 minutes or less, I thought about it, but no, he won.

I thought if I had been just super, super taken by this, maybe I would go out and, and watch the cabal cut, you know, a month later. Uh, I don’t know if I will, but, uh, so anyway, this is my first time seeing it. Craig, that’s also your first time seeing it. We talked about that. Yeah. 

Craig: Yeah. Which is again, as you already said, I think super weird.

I don’t know how both of us have gotten this far in our lives and have not seen this movie. Yeah. Um, because it’s not like it’s some, you know, strange, oddball thing that people have never heard about. People talk about this movie a lot. It’s Clive Barker. I’m a huge fan of his. I just don’t know. And like you said, it’s not like it was difficult to find.

It was right there on the video shelves. I can’t tell you how many times I looked at it and thought, well, that looks interesting, but I don’t know why I didn’t pick it up. 

Todd: But I didn’t, I think I can tell you why I didn’t pick it up when I was a kid and I saw this on the shelves, I looked at it and I saw all the different goth looking creatures and stuff on the front, and I thought, I think this movie’s necessarily gonna appeal to me.

I figured it was gonna be, and I probably read the back of it about a bunch of like gothy creatures in tunnels under the city or something like that, in some other world. And, and I, that just was not really the kind of thing I was into. I didn’t feel like there would be much mystery. I didn’t think it would be much.

I clearly was gonna be more fantasy than I was into at the time, which again, I was, I think we talked on the Hellraiser episode, took me forever to see Hellraiser because again, the imagery and just that appeal, it just wasn’t what I was into. Gimme a slasher, gimme the dream Master Freddy Krueger. Give me some cheesy fun to laugh at.

Horror movie. That’s very typical. This was just the aesthetic of it. Didn’t seem like it would appeal to me. So 

Craig: I don’t know. I don’t know why it didn’t appeal to me. It should have I, everything else like this did, like even the characters have kind of a very, like lab