Nightbreed - Worth Watching?

Angel Tarragon

Dawn Dragon
I've been seeing this aired a lot on the Showtime and Cinemax spin-off channels lately and was wondering what peoples thoughts are on it. It it worth watching?
 

log in or register to remove this ad

I liked it a lot; it's certainly unique, and has a great score with it as well. Lots of unusual monsters.

The wiki article about it says it suffers from an editing problem and I can see where that would be true; it's a bit choppy in places. Now that I know the comic series apparently cleaved closer to Barker's script, I'm interested in finding issues.
 


It's good - definitely worth the watch. It also definitely has some editing issues, but these are not too hard to overlook. It's based on Clive Barker's novel Cabal and is a pretty solid adaptation of the book. A little of the mythology is missing, along with a couple of minor character scenes, but this is only to be expected for screen adapations of books. The movie tries to develop the monsters more thoroughly than in the book, but unfortunately a fair bit of this added development was cut. There was supposed to be a director's cut forthcoming, but it has seemingly vanished or something like that, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

All in all a good movie with a wonderful performance by David Cronenberg (who is as spooky as his own films would suggest!), a great score and a cool look. I completely agree that it would make a killer setting for a game - I've often thought that it makes for a better WoD setting than the WoD itself, especially if you work in elements from other Barker books like Weaveworld, Imajica and the Books of the Art (which is pretty much how I run my own WoD games, heh heh...)
 


The movie is great, and when Palladium released Nightbane/Nightspawn it was the first movie I thought of, since the breed are alot like the Nightbane morphus forms that are possible, and if one wanted, it wouldn't be hard to adapt the nightbane tables to describe the breed forms.
 

sydbar said:
The movie is great, and when Palladium released Nightbane/Nightspawn it was the first movie I thought of, since the breed are alot like the Nightbane morphus forms that are possible, and if one wanted, it wouldn't be hard to adapt the nightbane tables to describe the breed forms.

I read Cabal about a year before the Palladium book came out I thought it was licenced to be the Nightbreed game - its definately derived from it...
 

Mark Hope said:
I completely agree that it would make a killer setting for a game - I've often thought that it makes for a better WoD setting than the WoD itself, especially if you work in elements from other Barker books like Weaveworld, Imajica and the Books of the Art (which is pretty much how I run my own WoD games, heh heh...)

You might be interested in the Witchcraft RPG, which has a lot of superficial comparisons to the WoD, but is a lot more open to tinkering and adding stuff, and also allows for a greater range of character types to work together and have it make sense mechanically and thematically. You could certainly do Barker's settings with it. IMO, it's a great "toolkit" RPG for any modern occult setting.

The main rulebook is avaliable as a free, legal download. http://www.edenstudios.net/witchcraft/index.html The supplements Abomination Codex and Mystery Codex expand the range of character types significantly, including ghosts, vampires, werebeasts and the like.
 

Elemental said:
You might be interested in the Witchcraft RPG, which has a lot of superficial comparisons to the WoD, but is a lot more open to tinkering and adding stuff, and also allows for a greater range of character types to work together and have it make sense mechanically and thematically. You could certainly do Barker's settings with it. IMO, it's a great "toolkit" RPG for any modern occult setting.

The main rulebook is avaliable as a free, legal download. http://www.edenstudios.net/witchcraft/index.html The supplements Abomination Codex and Mystery Codex expand the range of character types significantly, including ghosts, vampires, werebeasts and the like.
Witchcraft? Cool - I have a copy of that which I downloaded from DrivethruRPG (iirc) a while back. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, though, but I just took another look and it seems pretty cool. I'm a big fan of the toolkit approach, so I'll give it a closer read. Thanks for the reminder :).
 

When I saw it in the cinema the film broke down. It restarted but it was a bit of a problem. Yeah I read Cabal before I saw the film and it is alright. Cronenburg is very good though. And it helps that you have Charles Haid (Renko from Hill Street Blues) in it.
 

Remove ads

Top