Night-Flowers (1979)

Unpleasant story of rape and murder involving a disturbed veteran of the war in Vietnam.

Director:

Louis San Andres

Writer:

Gabriel Walsh

Stars:

Gabriel Walsh, José Pérez, Sabra Jones

1 win.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Gabriel Walsh	...	Tom Flynn
José Pérez	...	Nordi (as Jose Perez)
Sabra Jones	...	Marcella
Angel Lindbergh	...	Lauren
Henderson Forsythe	...	John Flynn
J.C. Quinn	...	Eddie Flynn
Lázaro Pérez	...	Danny Disco (as Lazaro Perez)
David Margulies	...	Psychiatrist
Jack Hollander	...	Mr. Ackleman
John Bartholomew Tucker	...	TV Newscaster
David Scholar	...	Veteran #1
Nelson Hailparn	...	Veteran #2
Glen Vincent	...	Wheelchair Veteran
John Ring	...	Man at Pool
Charles Gordon	...	Super

Storyline

Unpleasant story of rape and murder involving a disturbed veteran of the war in Vietnam.

---

Plot Keywords:

murder | rape | police | fishing | vietnam veteran | 

---

Taglines:

Now they're back and can't stop.

---

Genres:

Drama

---

Certificate:

R

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Also Known As:

Scars

Filming Locations:

Hoboken Shipyard, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Leonard Franklin Productions, Willow

Technical Specs

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Trivia

Linda Hamilton's motion picture debut.

User Reviews

Two disturbed Vietnam veterans kill a few New Yorkers without remorse

My copy ran 84 minutes, and it bore an SP mark at the outset from having been recorded. The print was an average video type print, not bad, nowhere near DVD quality. It's available on the internet.

The title read "Night Angels". Hardly.

I recognized Jose Perez from a later movie he did with Robert Mitchum "One Shoe Makes It Murder". Here, he and Gabriel Walsh play Vietnam vets (Nordi and Tom) who visit a VA hospital now and then. Tom's psychiatrist can't do much for him. He's distant, remote, dulled emotions, uncommunicative, sexually dysfunctional. He seems to be improving as the movie progresses because he meets a girl who loves him, but put a gun in his hand and he reverts to his Vietnam training. Nordi is talkative, horny, angry, and unable to interact with women normally. He is violent but it's not apparent on the surface.

The movie is like cinema verite in places, where you cannot tell the difference between extras if they are used or real New Yorkers. We are talking seedy and lower class New Yorkers. There is one scene at a women's wrestling match that really is very realistic and could be real.

Overall, the movie is slow, and we are the viewers looking into these men's private lives and their tawdry surroundings, like the athletic facility where Tom works at first. The documentary quality does not spare the viewer's feelings in a rape-murder scene (although there is no open sex and no blood) the way it is prolonged and realistic. The movie is not preachy, it does not moralize, but it shows broken lives and really a broken society in the kinds of subsidiary characters that appear throughout the film. That included Tom's family, the neighbors, and a hustler. The police were simply ineffectual, and so was the psychiatrist. It's pretty much a downbeat assessment of this stratum of society, but I'd say that if the film maker did the upper class or the ruling class, it would come out the same way.

There were places where I felt that Walsh's intelligence showed through and it was out of character for Tom. That and the pacing detracted, but the film was well above average in trying to express what the film writer saw as the truth. That writer is none other than Gabriel Walsh himself. I think he wanted to show the de-humanization brought about by soldiers fighting in these wars like Vietnam, and he succeeded.