Night Flight RULED!

August 26, 2011 8:52 PM

Help me find this creepy short film from the 80s I saw on Night Flight!

It would have been around 1985. I remember the film being called "Pin", but I can find anything remotely like it under that name.

The film was in b&w, and had something to do with a post-apocalyptic world. A family is living in a shack and is visited by an bald alien guy. There is something about a window box, and some pinwheels, then bald alien guy gets sick and dies, one of the kids sprinkles some gold dust on the window box, and the story is over. It was pretty grim, if I recall. Does this sound familiar to anyone???

posted by evilcupcakes to media & arts (7 answers total)

I have no idea what Night Flight is but there is a 1988 Canadian horror film called Pin.
posted by dobbs at 9:58 PM on August 26, 2011

According to this IMDB board question (and confirmed by a user who claims to be Dan Carbone, the writer/director), it's called Dot. From dancarbone.net:

A [sic] is a graduate of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Film School, his science fiction short “DOT” won awards in several international film festivals including the Marburg International Festival (Germany), Christchurch Film Festival (New Zealand), School of Visual Arts: Short Film Search (NYC), and was shown many times on the USA Cable network cult program “Night Flight.”

Here's part 1 on YouTube.
posted by Elsa at 6:52 AM on August 27, 2011

And here's part 2.
posted by Elsa at 6:58 AM on August 27, 2011

Ack! I remember Pin, as I'd read the book first as a teen (and found it, as one reviewer described it, a "nasty bit of fun") though it creeped me out for ages. Then, the movie came along and I caught it by accident one night, and felt the same way again - but the movie you're describing doesn't sound like Pin. Though if you decide to watch that sometime, years down the road when you see something like My Strange Addiction you'll immediately think of Leon in "Pin!".
posted by peagood at 11:12 AM on August 27, 2011

OMG Elsa that's it! I don't know how I got the name "Pin", maybe from the pinwheels. How in the hell did you dig that up?

Oh Dobbs, I have indeed seen "Pin". I caught that one late one night and was completely horrified at the, uh... nurse scene. BLEAHGH!!!
posted by evilcupcakes at 7:52 AM on August 28, 2011

Oh, and Night Flight was a really cool show USA would play late Friday and Saturday nights in the 80s. It was focused on playing music videos, movies, shorts, interviews, etc that catered to a sort of urban punk/new wave sensibility. It was THE thing to watch if you were coming of age at that time.
posted by evilcupcakes at 7:56 AM on August 28, 2011

I don't know how I got the name "Pin", maybe from the pinwheels.

To my mind, "pin" and "dot" are pretty easily transposed, especially at a distance of ~30 years and especially with the pinwheels as one of a very few vivid memories you had of it.

It wasn't tricky to find, happily: I just Googled "night flight" "short films" and found the IMDb question, which made it trivially easy to find the video. Once it started playing, I remembered seeing in the 80s, too!

And this thread reminded me about Pin, which I keep intending to watch and keep forgetting, so thank you!
posted by Elsa at 12:55 PM on August 28, 2011