You ever feel like a movie just doesn’t like you? You feel that, no matter how hard you try to make contact with it, it still holds you away at arm’s length? It sucks because it’s just like being an awkward teenager again. “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t you like me?” I got that feeling from “Night for Nixie.” No matter how hard I tried to connect with the bizarre events transpiring here, I just couldn’t do it. It was just too cold and distant to allow me to warm up to it. And that’s a shame because I’m down for a film that features a smiley face creature any day.
So, this film has something to do with an escaped creature from a genetics research laboratory, a missing professor, a detective out to find them (taking breaks only to jerk off to Internet porn), a creepy smiley face man (I think maybe the creature and he are one), prescription drugs and Mexican wrestlers. Put together as “Night for Nixie,” all of this makes sense to someone and that someone is not me. But who knows? Maybe “Nixie” isn’t supposed to make sense. Mike Lyddon definitely seems like he knew what he was doing by concocting a film this strange. It’s no accident. Lyddon made this film like this on purpose. I just think that he went so overboard that it has great potential to alienate its audience. It alientated me for sure. It would’ve been nice to have known what the hell was going on, but there just wasn’t anything in the way of characters or story development that made me WANT to know what the hell was going on. Before long I just let the images run over me as I waited for it all to end.
Still, I think lovers of psychotronic cinema might get a kick out of this one. They may even take it up as a challenge. As one of those lovers, I always enjoy seeing what mad experiments are bubbling in these filmmakers’ laboratories. It’s just that some of these experiments don’t exactly pan out.
