One of the most notorious "what the hell am I watching?" films among horror fans who cut their teeth on '80s VHS releases, Nomads occupies an even stranger place in film history now as the first starring vehicle for Pierce Brosnan (during his time on Remington Steele which ended up sabotaging his first hiring as James Bond) and the inaugural feature for director John McTiernan who was snapped up right after it to direct Predator (and onward to Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, etc.). The marketing for this film by short-lived distributor Atlantic didn't help matters with the theatrical poster, trailer, and eventual home video artwork selling this as one of the scariest supernatural films ever made. Needless to say, viewers were puzzled when they instead got a hazy mixture of street punks, possession, and wailing guitars, with the swirling ghosts seen on the poster nowhere in sight.

In an L.A. emergency room, Dr. Eileen Flax (Down) treats a hysterical, dying man, Jean-Charles Pommier (Brosnan), who somehow passes on his recent memories that she keeps experiencing at inconvenient moments. In the process we see how he and his wife, Niki (Monticelli), were plunged into a nightmare when their house became the target of a group of nomadic punks with ties to global mysticism. Pommier also sees them dealing with what appears to be the aftermath of a murder, and armed with the advice of a strange nun (Bay), he embarks on a deadly path that will directly impact Eileen when she connects with Niki.

Apart from the questionable decision to arm Brosnan with a French accent, Nomads boasts a colorful and sometimes startling cast with the nomads themselves consisting of -- really -- Mary Woronov, Adam Ant, Josie Cotton, Frank Doubleday, and Hector Mercado. Toss in a cameo by golden age Hollywood vet NIna Foch, and you end up with a distinctive mid-'80s stew that works better as a stylish head trip than a traditional horror film. It's certainly entertaining and boasts some fun chase scenes, even if you're not entirely sure what's going on some of the time; that includes the crazy final twist which will definitely leave an impression. It also features one of the craziest scores ever composed by Oscar winner Bill Conti, who used, uh, Ted Nugent for the guitar solos and somehow wedged this in between F/X, The Karate Kid Part II, and Masters of the Universe. In short, if this film had Lamberto Bava credited as the director and Simon Boswell as the composer, folks would be salivating.

First released on U.S. VHS by Kartes Video with a subsequent laserdisc from Image Entertainment, the film was presented open matte with a transfer that boosted the brightness up quite a bit to help make out the numerous night scenes in standard def. As with almost everything else in the Atlantic library, it passed over to MGM and was given a DVD release in 2002 with a trailer as the sole extra. The HD master created by the studio for broadcast was also used for a U.S. Blu-ray from Scream Factory in 2015, featuring the trailer, a radio spot, a still gallery, and two featurettes. "Paging Doctor Flax" (16m28s) features Down primarily talking about how she got into acting and what she learned about the industry's ins and outs, her friendship with Kastner that led to being cast, doing her own stunts due to "stupidity and youth," and her less than harmonious working process with McTiernan. Then in "Musical Nomads" (17m24s), Conti covers his own approach to creating music and building a sonic payoff, the fun of working with electronics and guitars instead of full orchestras, the "funky part of town" where they recorded, the unorthodox process of writing the score.

In 2025, U.K. label Treasured Films gave Nomads a greatly expanded Blu-ray special edition with a new 2K scan from the original negative that greatly improves on the outdated prior HD source with more detail, better color reproduction, and just about everything else. It's also the first time the film has been uncensored since the VHS days, removing some drastic optical darkening that obscured most of Brosnan's nude scene in earlier MGM masters. The DTS-HD 5.0 English mix here is also a nice step up, restoring the aggressive presentation almost no one got to hear in theaters and sounding heftier than the 2.0 stereo version in past releases. As usual, optional English SDH subtitles are included. A new commentary features McTiernan and Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie author Eric Lichtenfeld is obviously essential as it features the filmmaker going into detail about how he got his first feature gig, what he went through with the screenplay, how he worked with Kastner, and what creative decisions he made along the way. Occasionally he'll also just dismiss a potentially rich question which can be either amusing or frustrating, depending what you expect to hear. The Down and Conti interviews are carried over here, while the great new "Delightful Alchemy" (8m57s) has Brosnan recalling working with McTiernan and his "Celtic darkness" fresh out of the AFI, his positive response to the script, the ties to producer Elliott Kastner and 007, the shooting in L.A. including tossing a guy off a roof in Century City, and his pleasant surprise at revisiting it today. In "A Fringe Genre Exercise" (12m36s), Kim Newman covers the flamboyant reinventions of the horror genre around the mid-'80s, the notable aspects of this film, McTiernan's place in the era's cinematic pantheon, and the ways this does or doesn't qualify as a horror film. Also included are radio spot and trailer plus an 8m58s gallery, while buying it directly from the label also gets you a rigid slipcase with new art by Ilan Sheady of Uncle Frank Productions, an illustrated booklet with essays by Alan Jones, Amanda Reyes, Michael Doyle and Andrew Llewellyn, and six art cards.

Reviewed on July 12, 2025