Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

purrsnfur I've read a LOT of negative comments on this film here, and for those of you who wrote them I have to say "You're missing the point!" This film was never intended as a true-to-life factual account of the life and crimes of Richard Ramirez, instead it is a fictional piece loosely based on actual events. And although it certainly has it's weak points, it is overall a terrifying journey into the mind of a madman! The drug-induced, heavy metal, head-whipping sequences are a brilliant way to accomplish this, and they really worked for me. The acting was a bit amateurish though, and I didn't care for the way the lady cop was portrayed as blundering and ineffectual throughout most of the film.Even with it's challenges, this film is fascinating-and each time I watch it I discover something I missed in previous viewings. Not to mention, it never fails to send me to my doors and windows to make sure they're securely latched-because as this film so aptly points out, there's a lot of sickos out there!

Malcolm_Riviera If you have an interest in the real Richard Ramirez a.k.a. "The Nightstalker" case, please don't waste your precious time and definitely not your money on this. This movie could possibly have been saved by simply changing the title and character names. You could rename it "The Crack Stalker" and change all the names of the characters -- and you would then at least have a Grade C horror flick to show at 4:00 am on Cinemax. It has all the basic elements of some kind of random serial killer flick, and the killer is certainly a highly unpleasant fellow. But to pass this off as having anything to do with the real Nightstalker case is just plain stupid. On the old Saturday Night Live, critic Leonard Pinth-Garnell might have reviewed this as "Stunningly bad!"

Paul Andrews Nightstalker starts in 'Los Angeles 1985' where one fateful night a man (Bret Roberts) has a bad foot fetish experience with a prostitute named Cherry (Roxanne Day) so he decides to don some black leather gloves & kill a couple of Hispanic people in they're own home. The next morning & Hispanic cops Officer's Gabriella Martinez (Roselyn Sanchez) & Frank Luis (Danny Trejo) are called to the house when relatives become worried, the two Officer's enter the house & find the mutilated & violated corpses. The killer seems to target the Hispanic community in Los Angeles & as more of them are brutally murdered Officer Martinez is promoted to homicide detective, more to appease to & calm the Hispanic community down than for her actual detective skills but what she doesn't know won't hurt her, right? The senseless & brutal murders continue, can Martinez make a useful contribution to the case & prove her male counterparts wrong? I'll give you three guesses & the first two don't count... (not that you'll need them anyway!)Written, co-produced & directed by Chris Fisher Nightstalker is the latest in a long line of low budget crap that I've sat through recently, honestly sometimes I wonder why I even bother I really do. Anyway, never let it be said I don't give a film a chance & I did at least make it all way through it. Even though his name is never mentioned Nightstalker is apparently based on the crimes of serial killer Robert Ramirez who killed members of the Los Angeles Hispanic community back in the 80's, having lived in England all my life I have never heard of Ramirez or his crimes so I really can't say how accurately this depicts them. The script throws in a bald headed demon that 'tells' the nightstalker to kill, the fictional cop Martinez to try & have a central character & add a few melodramatics to the proceedings & by all accounts has very little to do with the real Ramirez & has no real regard or intent for factual recreation. I can understand filmmakers wanting to change a few things around & spice things up a bit but in this case Nightstalker just comes across like a really bad cheapo low budget horror. It moves along at a fair pace & I didn't fall asleep (it was quite late too) so I have to give it that but overall I can't exactly heap praise on Nightstalker as it's simply not very good & ultimately that's the bottom line I'm afraid. I also take offence at the notion that he killed because of his foot fetish, even if it was unintentional they show him acting out a fantasy with a prostitute just before he kills his first victims which clearly sends some sort of message out, doesn't it?Director Fisher turns in one of the most annoying film to watch I've sat through, his use of gimmicky editing & MTV style editing & manipulation is irritating to say the least. From stupid time-lapse photography, fast forward, hi-speed, low-speed, blurriness, jerky hand held camera shots & constant drab low level lighting set to the most awful rock tracks you have a film which may literally give it's audience a head ache. These annoying flashy sequences are really unnecessary as proved by the fact the films most effective scene is when these processes aren't used. Forget about any decent violence, a few blood stained murder scenes & a couple of eyeballs in a box, that's it.Technically Nightstalker is OK apart from those annoying editing tricks, according to the IMDb Nightstalker was edited in the editor's living room & that it was shot in a mere 16 days. Neither of these revelations come as any real surprise to me & 16 days? What took them so long!? The acting was OK but did anyone else notice Trejo's moustache? The one side is fine but one half of the other half was shaved off, he literally only had three quarters of his moustache! Is this a fashion thing? Pay close attention when he & Sanchez are talking outside her house near the end, you'll see what I mean...Nightstalker is a pretty bad film when all said & done, it's as simple & straight forward as that. There are much better films out there although as I said at least it kept me watching to the bitter end which is something I suppose.

Vassago This movie makes Paul W. S. Anderson and Uwe Boll look talented, and their flicks appear enjoyable. Unbelievably, Fisher's "Nighstalker" manages to be, simultaneously, campy and filthy, annoying and dull, unnerving and boring, ridiculous and repulsive. There is really nothing good about it, apart from perhaps the cover and Bret Roberts - the actor who portrays Ramirez (and even he looks - expectedly - embarrassed when the hack "director", Fisher, has him play a flour-covered "vampire" weirdo, which, in Fisher's 12-year-old mentality was intended as a "symbolic" representation of what Ramirez sees in his "possessed" mind during the crime spree).The "story" is sub-imbecilic and is not in fact even loosely based on the actual events. Fisher's "writing" skills are almost as high as those of a drug-induced 13 year old metalhead, fresh after drinking a sixpack of beer and viewing "House of 1000 Corpses" with his Deicide tape playing right into his ears. In fact, said metalhead would probably write and direct a better movie than Fisher's (well, it certainly could not be any worse!) - at least in *his* film, there would be no unnerving stroboscopic Pokemon "techniques", which Fisher loves so much.As far as the director's "factual" treatment and "research" go, this flick's script was apparently based on Fisher's experience of trying to read a short, misspelled summary of an article reviewing a book with a chapter whose part described a documentary about comic books depicting serial killers, who happened to include Ramirez. Fisher's directing is, if possible, even worse than his "writing" - often, this flick is simply unwatchable, with its shaky, chaotic camera movement and ridiculous (and nauseatingly long) high-speed segments set to obnoxious, vomit-inducing, ear-shattering noise which Fisher apparently considers to be "music" (and which in fact did not even exist in 1985 - Night Stalker would listen to the likes of AC/DC and Springsteen, not some antitalent, late 1990s Death Metal bands).The only potentially redeeming aspect of this movie might be the fact that, much like Ed Wood's movies (which are, of course, infinitely better, involve much more talent, decent music and superior directing), it often manages to be unintentionally funny. For instance, Fisher often makes an infantile attempt at inserting cheap "ambience" into scenes by filling their backgrounds with repeated white noise and incomprehensible mumbling done in a low bass. He intends this mumbling to be the "voice of Satan", but it sounds exactly like the Psychlos from John Travolta's Therefore, every time I heard Fisher's "Satan", I would think "Ooh-oh, it's Travolta the Terl!" and burst out laughing. Fisher's ludicrous image of "Satan" himself - the aforementioned flour-covered bald Howard the Duck reject with sharp teeth - made the scenes even funnier.As for the DVD itself, there were some deleted scenes (even though the whole film should have been one deleted scene), a trailer, a bit better than the flick itself (in the same sense as gonorrhea is better than AIDS), plus a commentary track from Mr Antitalent himself, Chris Fisher (at least I've read that there is a commentary, on the DVD box - I did not actually listen to it, since I have no intention to hear talentless dolts drone about themselves.)A while ago I bought the DVD with the TV film about Ramirez ("Manhunt") from Amazon Europe, and any second of that film highly surpasses Fisher's lameness. I never thought I could see someone less talented than Paul W. S. Anderson and Uwe Boll actually find employment in Hollywood - but today I saw him, and his name was "Chris Fisher".