As I’ve said in the past, one of the benefits of living in Los Angeles is that we have an active revival circuit - The New Beverly, The Egyptian, The Aero, The Silent Movie Theatre and The Nuart all help keep movie junkies like myself off our couches and in the darkness of a movie theatre.
Last night I attended a revival that could only happen in L.A. - a midnight screening of Nightwing, the 1979 horror film that proclaimed itself to be “Jaws with wings.” I was taken to see this film at the tender age of eight by my cousins while my family was on vacation in Florida, and it scared the living hell out me. I caught pieces of it on HBO in the early eighties, but then the film dropped out of sight altogether. To date, it has not been released on DVD, and is out of print on vhs.
Since that fateful day in 1979, my memories of the film have been fragmented; the corpse of a dead Indian shaman bleeding through his burial shroud – a woman falling into a campfire as she is attacked by vampire bats – ghosts in a cave dwelling – an eerie, silhouetted image of an Indian standing on a rocky crag in the desert at sunset, his arms held up in triumph. My adolescent mind was also transfixed by the sight of a young and lovely Kathryn Harrold bathing in a hot spring (as was my adult mind upon seeing the film again).
Sitting in The Nuart, watching a shockingly pristine print unroll, all of those fragments began to fall into place - unfortunately, I had to watch the entire movie to find them.
The movie truly is “Jaws with wings” – Nick Mancuso (an Italian pretending to be an American Indian) plays Youngman Duran, a New Mexico sheriff whose tribe, the Maskai, are being driven out by an ambitious Indian named Walker Chee (Stephen Macht, a Jew pretending to be an American Indian) who wants to drill for oil on their sacred land.
Duran’s grandfather, an aged Indian mystic, dies shortly before a colony of deadly vampire bats invade the territory - killing cattle, sheep, and reborn Christians! With the help of “vampire bat expert” Phillip Payne (David Warner), who is essentially a splicing of Hooper and Quint from Jaws, Duran tries to locate and destroy the colony only to realize via a drug-induced hallucination (don’t ask) that the ghost of his dead grandfather has summoned the bats to reclaim the land for his people.
Put simply, the film is lousy. It’s a perfect example of why A-list directors shouldn’t make B-movies. Director Arthur Hiller strained so hard to elevate the material that he neglected to make an entertaining movie. The only person who seems to realize he’s in a silly B-movie is David Warner, who hams it up gloriously. Otherwise, the performances and direction are so earnest it’s painful to watch.
Does it have any virtues, you ask? Yes. The cinematography by Charles Rosher, Jr. is top notch, and Henry Mancini’s stellar score summons up a sense of mysticism and dread that the film itself does not contain. His music single-handedly gives the audience an emotional connection to an otherwise tedious and uninvolving film. So kudos to Chuck and Hank – you came through this mess unscathed.
After the film, actors Nick Mancuso (still quite handsome) and Stephen Macht (still quite ugly) came up and talked about the movie. Note I don’t use the term “Q & A” – that’s because the moderator, known as “Mr. Beaks” on AICN, was so utterly pathetic a host he sat impotently and asked no questions while both actors rambled endlessly about their early years and spiritual experiences, some of which were undoubtedly drug-induced - the highlight being Mancuso’s nutty anecdote about seeing a white dove as a medicine man performed a chant over him, and feeling compelled to pursue it into the mountains to converse with it. Finally, the entire mess sputtered to a halt, and I ducked out of the theatre at precisely 2:51 am.
Like Centennial, Nightwing is a film that made an impression on me as a young boy, so it was a great deal of fun for me to revisit it, especially in a movie theatre. But even if a widescreen DVD should appear someday, think twice before you sit down to watch this turkey.
Upon completing the novel Lonesome Dove, I discovered that certain elements of the story are based in actual Texas history. My beloved protagonists, Gus and Call, are loosely based on two real cattlemen - Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, who drove two thousand head of cattle from Texas to Colorado, establishing the Goodnight / Loving trail. When Loving was struck by Indian arrows and died of blood poisoning, Goodnight carried his body all the way back to Texas for burial, as Call does for Gus.
I’ve never been much of a fan of director Ron Howard. His films have always struck me as competently made, but pedestrian - lacking in personality and passion. 
A casual glance at this site will inform even the most unobservant of people that I love a good old-fashioned Western. Sure, I respect films like Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves, but they are revisionist, politically correct Westerns with a modern point of view and were partially responsible for killing the genre at the box office.
