Protraph Lack of good storyline.

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Smoreni Zmaj Nightbreed is an adaptation of Barker's novel Cabal from 1988. As I love this book very much, and Barker personally adapted it into screenplay and directed the film, I'm probably not able to observe it objectively. With exception of, from today's perspective, outdated special effects, this movie is perfect fantasy/horror action. Twenty years ago, when I first read the book and saw the movie, I was amazed. Now after watching it again I'm giving it strong eight. Role of main villain is played by David Cronenberg, and some fantasy and horror writers, including Neil Gaiman, also have brief appearances. Unlike the book that is genius, the film does not have a particular depth or characterization, but it has a phenomenal atmosphere and very interesting and original "monsters", as well as great music. I recommend you to watch director's cut and make sure you read the book.8/10

TheRedDeath30 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.

poe426 Back before television became a breeding ground for fantasy knockoffs, NIGHTBREED seemed unique enough to warrant mention; nowadays, of course, it's almost quaint with its cast of motley monsters struggling to survive alongside The Human Race. The opening chase through the field (not unlike a similar scene in the anime classic VAMPIRE HUNTER D) is an attention-grabber right from the start, and many of the Monsters we encounter throughout the movie are truly memorable (my favorite being the wide-eyed child found outside the Underground entrance). Anyone who's seen shows like SUPERNATURAL or GRIMM will find themselves in familiar territory, but it was Clive Barker who got there first and NIGHTBREED's STILL a nifty little Monster movie.

Hollowshape In 2011 I saw The Theatrical Cut of Nightbreed. I thought it was rushed, confused and incoherent but really captivating. It's a visual fest with marvelous sets and creatures. Despite all the studio meddling, it's still Clive Barker. The film stirred my imagination. I wanted more and I did some serious research, reading upon on the film to find out what went wrong. I eventually read the novella, CABAL (which the movie is based on) as well as the comic book adaptation and two drafts of the script... so I could see Clive Barker's original vision for the film. In 2012 I even got see The Cabal Cut, a composite cut of VHS workprint footage and the Warner Bros. DVD.In 2014, Clive Barker's The Director's Cut was released. What do I think of it? Well, it's certainly superior to the Theatrical Cut in every way. The film now has better pacing and a proper story. A love story, in fact. The relationship between the two main characters are fleshed out. The original ending (which makes more sense than the ending for the Theatrical Cut) has been restored. However, it's far from perfect. There is still significant footage (most of which I saw in The Cabal Cut) that wasn't restored restored for this cut. But it's also kinda difficult to meet my expectations and fully please me since I had already formed the uncut, extended cut of Nightbreed in my head long before I had seen The Director's Cut. But this is the version I will revisit in the future. It is closer to Clive Barker's original vision...As a horror fan, one of the things I love about Nightbreed is the serial killer-slasher vs. supernatural creatures aspect of the film. It's two sub-genres within horror colliding on screen. That's never been done before (or since.) It's like if Hannibal Lecter met Dracula. Clive Barker loves the monsters movies of the 1930s... Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks and Island of Lost Souls... Nightbreed is an homage to those classic movies. But Barker has said that he HATES the slasher films that dominated the 1980s. So, why is there a slasher character in this story? Well, Dr. Decker is the main villain of the story and obviously suppose to represent the slasher genre (that had dried up by 1989). It's interesting how Barker depicts the character of Dr. Decker. Barker doesn't glamorize him. He is the complete antithesis to such horror icons like the tragic sympathetic Jason and the darkly comical Freddy. People root for these characters. However, you cannot root for Decker... he is a vile, manipulative and horrible human being who enjoys slaughtering children, not dumb horny teenagers. The opening murder scene in Nightbreed is scarier than anything in Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. At the end of the film, *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* Boone triumphs over and kills Dr. Decker.*SPOILERS* *SPOILERS*This is Clive Barker saying "Goodbye vapid juvenile slashers of the 80s, now let's bring back the imaginative monster genre for the 90s."However, the studio hated everything about the film, with the expectation of Dr. Decker. They thought there was franchise potential with this slasher character, because of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, and forced Clive Barker to recut and reshoot Nightbreed; trimming down the monsters, the main love story and adding in new sequences resolving around Dr. Decker to make him a larger character for future sequels. Barker did the best he could to make it all feel organic to the film he had made. But so much of Nightbreed ended up on the cutting room floor and the focus of the story shifted onto the slasher character; it wasn't Clive Barker's vision anymore. Nightbreed bombed at the box office and seemingly made no impact on the genre. The early 90s was a dead zone for horror. In 1996 Hollywood made the smug self-aware slasher film Scream which, instead of Nighbreed, became THE horror film of the 90s. It celebrated slasher films and sadly regenerated the sub- genre...But Nightbreed isn't really a horror film. It's dark, romantic fantasy film with elements of horror and action. It's a unique, ambitious, multilayered allegory for intolerance. It draws parallels to racism, homophobia and the Holocaust. Nightbreed is about the celebrating the dark and weird, and I find that really wonderful, being an outcast myself. It's one of my favorite films...