Nomads (1986) - By Mark Hite

Film Reviews: Nomads (1986) - By Mark Hite
Posted on Wednesday, June 01, 2005 @ 00:00:00 Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

Nomads 1986 Have you ever gone by a group of punk kids and thought to yourself, “Man are they for real?” The movie Nomads will make you rethink paying attention to them at all.

Nomads, staring Pierce Brosnan and Lesley-Anne Down, first came out in 1986. The movie itself was not a huge box office success. Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, and Platoon were already part of an impressive array of flicks gracing the big screen that year. In simple terms, this movie didn’t stand a chance.

The movie opens up with an overworked Dr. Flax (Lesley-Anne Down) attending a disturbed patient (Pierce Brosnan). The patient is battered up pretty bad and speaking gibberish in French. While she tries to examine him, he sits up and bites her ear. Shortly thereafter the patient dies leaving everyone wondering who he was. After getting stitched up, Flax goes home for some well deserved rest. Immediately she starts having unexplainable visions which are definitely not her own.

It turns out the strange patient she attended the day before was a famed French anthropologist named Jean Charles Pommier. Flax starts to go deeper into her strange visions and ends up passing out at work. Flax goes full fledged into dementia and starts to have flashbacks about Pommier’s life. It is at this point Flax leaves the hospital and Pommier’s story comes into focus.

Weeks before his death, Pommier had just moved into a new home with his wife. Immediately he finds out they are not welcome in the neighborhood. A group of thugs in a black van vandalize his garage door and continuously speed by his house. Pommier, being the inquisitive anthropologist, grabs his camera one day and follows the van.

He snaps several pictures of the gang who are dressed up in 80s new wave fashions. The gang run through town indiscriminately terrorizing the common folk. Pommier keeps his distance but finally has enough when the gang kills someone and drops the body into a trash bin. He is chased away by the gang but later catches up with them and takes several close up shots. Pommier develops the pictures and to his surprise, the gang did not appear in them.

During all of this, the movie goes in and out from Pommier’s story to Flax’s dementia. It turns out she is reliving his last few moments on earth in full detail.. Meanwhile, Flax’s co-workers are looking for her and find out she had called a place for the definition of the word Inuit. The Inuit are evil Eskimo spirits that wonder the world looking for victims to notice them.

Pommier’s visions continue to haunt Flax as she finds out how the spirits terrorized him until his demise. Pommier is confronted by the spirit of a nun who tells him to flee his house and his life. After this vision he takes a crow bar to one of the Inuit but finds out it has no effect. All of these visions finally lead Flax to Pommier’s old home. It turns out that her role in all of this was to help his wife escape from the Inuit. They do this successfully but find out that a new, and familiar, member of the Inuit’s has been added at the end of the movie.

The movie itself has a tendency to be very confusing. Flax’s visions go in and out so the viewer never knows who’s reality they’re are experiencing at any given point. However, this goes nicely with the theme of the movie which is reality may be more distorted than you think. The constant theme of what is there may not be is drilled into the viewers head. The images are and themes are very dark throughout the movie which goes well with the bleak plot line. Be warned though, this is more of a psychological thriller than a horror film.

This film was directed by John McTiernan who at the time was also directing a movie due on in 1987 called Predator staring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It would be in 1988 when McTiernan gave us what some consider to be the ultimate action flick, Die Hard.