Horrorfest 2013: Nightwatch

I remember when I was in high school, renting pretty much every independent movie that looked cool on the video store shelf, or said "Miramax" on the box, or both, I'd constantly see a trailer at the beginning of every tape for this flick NIGHTWATCH, a horror movie starring Ewan McGregor. And I'd think, when's this movie coming out? I should watch it. And then it kept on not coming out.

Somehow I never ended up watching it, and now I know that this was actually a remake of a 1994 Danish flick of the same name. So, now I've seen the original, and I still haven't seen the Ewan McGregor one.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as a law student who takes a job as a night watchman at a morgue. His friends balk at the creepiness of the job, but our hero is attracted to the fact that he can sit on his butt doing nothing all night and basically get paid to study. Much like my ill-fated job watering the Bayou golf course, it turns out the reality of the job is much worse than the fantasy.

Turns out there's a necrophiliac serial killer in town knocking off women who's bound to cross paths with our law student hero.

There's a great sequence early on in which an older night watchman (Gyrd Lofquist) shows our young hero the ropes, including an alarm in the night watchman's office that's triggered by chains hanging above morgue beds in case any of the bodies happen to wake up in the night. "It'll never go off," we're assured. But what if it does?  "It won't." Still, what if? The old night watchman ominously recommends keeping a baseball bat handy.

There's also a lot of time devoted to our hero's relationship with a ne'er-do-well best buddy (Kim Bodnia). The real story here is how these two guys are already disillusioned with their lives, even though they're so young, and they're at a point where they don't know whether or not they want to stick with their serious girlfriends or have another shot at going wild. In an effort to explore this, they pose "challenges" to each other ranging from picking fights at bars to hiring hookers.

The serial killer plot is really the least interesting aspect of the movie. It has a lot more going for it than that, specifically, a great premise. Hell, the premise is creepy enough, I would have been happy with a movie about the realities of being a night watchman in a morgue, no serial killer needed.