{ title: 'The Spectrum (Buffalo, N.Y.) 1955-current, July 06, 1979, Page 9, Image 9', download_links: [ { link: 'http://www.loc.gov/rss/ndnp/ndnp.xml', label: 'application/rss+xml', meta: 'News about NYS Historic Newspapers - RSS Feed', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-07-06/ed-1/seq-9/png/', label: 'image/png', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-07-06/ed-1/seq-9.pdf', label: 'application/pdf', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-07-06/ed-1/seq-9/ocr.xml', label: 'application/xml', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-07-06/ed-1/seq-9/ocr.txt', label: 'text/plain', meta: '', }, ] }
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Copies | Bloodless flick needs transfusion 'Nightwing' bites audience by Ross Chapman Iron, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, 7 and Tom Jones). Unfortunately £ for Warner, Paine provides us with - w the film’s most hilarious moments £■ (unintentionally, of course). When < offered $25,000 for his ’services, <o he turns it down, saying, \There’s no fee. I kill vampire bats. That’s what I do. I find them and I kill them.” When asked why he’s so keen on killing the critters, he replies, \Someone has to kill them .. .They’re the quintessence of evil!\ Nightwing, a nlovie about a “highly intelligent colony of vampire bats” which bloodsuck a number of people to death on a southwestern Indian reservation, is a totally valueless experience except that it provides us with a necessary cure. Ever since the release of The Warriors, there has been circulating the strange and erroneous notion that Arthur Hiller is an auteur ready for investiture into the pantheon of great American directors. His advocates point to such films as The Out-of-Towners, The Hospital, The Man In The Glass Booth, and Silver Streak. But let it not be forgotten that he has also directed such bombs as Tobruk, Popi, Love Story, W.C. Fields and Me, and now, Nightwing. Sandpapered postcards Paine informs us in the course of the film that vampire bats attack in huge numbers, have teeth that can cut to the bone, gorge themselves on three times their own weight in blood, completely drain their victims, \piss pure amonia,” frequently savage humans, and are responsible for the destruction of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. (I might add to this that vampire bats are also responsible for hair loss, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and are linked to the disappearance of Amelia Eatheart in the 1930’s.) Furthermore, we learn that humans die “in three seconds\ in ammonia, that ammonia is highly flammable, and that shale oil rocks easily catch fire. These and other amusing idiocies lend smirks, guffaws, and hoots to an otherwise soporific affair. by elements other than direction. In The Out-of-Towners and The Man In The Glass Booth, for example, die films succeeded because of good scripts and talehted acting. Hiller’s contribution was to provide an adequate visual frame. But oftentimes, he fails to do even this. In the film The Tiger Makes Out, Hiller was presented with a fine screenplay and two accomplished performers but failed, filming as if it were an historical drama. The'' tight conservative direction almost completely undercut the frantic insanity of the writing and acting. In Nightwing he is presented with nothing and he produces nothing. Other directors can take an unworthy script and do something interesting with it as in (to take recent examples) Alien and The Last Embrace. But Hiller cannot supply the direction necessary for a film to succeed on visuals alone. In Nightwing, Hiller subjects us to poor imitations of Hitchcock’s The Birds, the subjective tracking shots of jaws and assorted other shots pilfered from Kubrick' and others. Here, Hiller’s camera is slippery. It slides around, cranes up and down for no good reason - perhaps Hiller was trying to keep awake. In each of these films, Hiller’s direction is at best competent, at worst inappropriate, but always unimaginative and derivative. What makes a Hiller film good is that it fcv-not a Hiller film: the merit of his good films is supplied Funnier than fear • And this could indeed be the answer. There is nothing to do between giggles in Nightwing but sleep. The script, written by a gaggle of writers including Steve Shagan (who a Buffalo Evening News critic described as “the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge version of Arthur Miller\) is the vacuum of a yawn, a boring drawn-out melange of Indian mysticism, gore, cops’n’robbers, and romantic interest (or disinterest as the case may be, and, in fact, is). The film attempts to entertain us by terrifying us but fails and is entertaining only in its outbursts of absurdity— Much of this absurdity centers on the character.Paine, who is a vampire bat exterminator and who is played by David Warner (an actor for whom I have developed some respect after his performances in The Cross of Besides the severe retardation of the plot, which includes some occultish nonsense about an ancient medicine man who can end the world with a sandpainting in order to rid his tribe of the white man and his forked tongue, Nightwing abuses us with bad acting (featuring such zombies as Nick Mancuso) and grainy, uninventive cinematography giving the film the look of sandpapered postcards. All things considered, Arthur Hiller, like in his best films, is, in Nightwing, well atuned to his subject matter. 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