User Reviews

Nightmares (or Stage Fright as it's known in some territories) has a lot going for it - moody cinematography, some sleaze, the potential for backstage theatrical drama, a little light satire, and some gore, but it squanders all of it because it has no idea what it wants to be.

A young actress named Helen who accidentally killed her adulterous mother in a car crash as a child wins a role in a major play and someone starts to killer her co-stars and co-workers with pieces of broken glass (just like how mom died!) Who could it be?

Well, frankly, it's blatantly obvious that it's Helen and the movie never even tries to disguise it for a second, which leaves the film feeling really hollow and sort of boring. They like to play it off as a mystery by just showing her hands and feet during the murder sequences, but they're not fooling us for a second. It also doesn't help that, psycho killer stuff aside, Helen is a pretty awful person. She flies off the handle at the drop of a hat and yells at her roommate and co-stars constantly. Are we supposed to feel for this shrew? She's awful! I assume we're supposed to root for her since none of her co-stars are given any sort of character development and most of them don't even seem to have names.

Most of Nightmares is so over the top that I assumed it was meant to be some sort of parody or satire of Hitchcock, De Palma, and the slasher genre of the time. Scenes of Helen flying off the handle and being slapped by her co-stars or scenes with her running to her room and having a shouting match with herself as her hapless boyfriend listens in horror are hysterically funny, but I can't tell if they were intentional or not. Certainly, the scenes involving the cruel play's director and the even crueler theatre critic are meant to be comic, but seem to exist as leftovers from a far better, more interesting film where everyone is in on the joke. Maybe Nightmares should have embraced the satirical nature of the story and gone wild with them.

As is, Nightmares is a torrent of missed opportunities and "what if"s. There are both a decent slasher/giallo and a satirical dark comedy in here fighting for screen time.

Nightmares is one of those better horror films with an intriguing premise. Causing an accident which took the life of her mother, when she was a little girl, now an adult, the horrific visual memory, that 63 night, of seeing her mother thrown through a windscreen, at the sound of splintering glass, leads her on a series of killings, using shards of glass. Unfortunately for the whole cast of the acting troupe, she's just joined (this includes a twentyish Garry Sweet) they are to become her latest victims. Some of them meet their fate in quite gruesome ways. Some of the violence in Nightmares is sexual too, particularly an early scene, that's quite sick, and eye shocked me the first time I saw it. It involves a naked girl in a steeet, non thespian, fleeing off, after her naked lover buys it, in the lower region I might of add. The girl becomes trapped and this shard of glass rips across her breast a couple of times, where her nakedness is soon the colour of mucky red as she scrambles away, but inevitably becomes another victim to this psycho's credit. What I loved about this scene, was that it was shot if in hand held motion, but also at different angles, all from out psycho's POV. It was really quite scary, well the first time I saw. There are a couple of scary moments here and there. Nightmares doesn't have a happy outcome. The last victim (Sweet) buys it in bed, the same place he did in Macbeth, not so violently I would imagine. Yes our psycho gets away, unscathed. Let's face it, some psychos in movies do. As an end gag, we hear our female psycho stating her name again, for she is auditioning once more. Her character being a great actress, we know she's gonna win the audition, and that means a new batch of victims. Jenny Neumann is fantastic as the taunted girl, screaming and ranting to herself, and missing stage cues, while in la la land. The rest bring in so so performances, apart from Max Phipps, great as a harsh director, who me, personally as an actor, wouldn't want to have as a director, plus his ally, evil tongued critic, John Michael Howson, also great and funny too. This guy could actually act. He's also credited with the movie's idea. Not a badly made flick, and one of the better Aussie horrors, but not a great one.

Jenny Neumann (from the sexploitation flick MISTRESS OF THE APES, the American slasher HELL NIGHT and others) is Helen Selleck, an American actress who gets a lead role in an Australian stage production. She's a virgin because as a little girl she saw her mom having sex and then accidentally caused the car accident that killed her. Meanwhile, a black-gloved killer prowls around the theater slashing up people with shards of glass.

***MAJOR SPOILER***

The killer is obviously Helen (she speaks in her dead mother's voice, washes blood off her hands after the murders and is seen killing a child molester with a broken bottle as a little girl!), but this has gratuitous heavy-breathing POV camera-work and conceals the identity of the murderer until the very end like it's supposed to be some big surprise.

The entire cast seems obsessed with talking about, having or trying to have sex, and, in one case, even blackmailing their way into getting laid. There's quite a bit of nudity and blood, but there's no sense of continuity, the photography is murky and the editing (by Colin Eggleston, who also scripted and produced) is terrible. The theater setting for a slasher film predates Soavi's film of the same name and Argento's OPERA (both of which are better than this one ) by five years though, and Neumann is pretty hot.

I've always thought that slashers are a sub-genre that thrives on being trashy. They're ultimately all about the kills so those kills need to be as bloody as possible, and the between-kills moments are essentially just filler so there may as well be plenty of boobage in those parts. A slasher with class is kind of like a pizza with low-fat cheese - better for you, but not as indulgent and a little bit pointless. Fortunately, Nightmares, one of the very first slashers to cash in on Halloween's success (yes, before Friday the 13th) was made by Aussie soft-porn legend John D. Lamond (the strip club guy from Not Quite Hollywood) who knows more than a thing or two about cooking up cinematic junk food.

Nightmares starts with a young girl accidentally getting a peek at her mother having sex (what a slut!), before a car crash where she sees Mummy get her neck sliced open on the broken windshield. Naturally, having a childhood forged in the fires of sex and violence means that she grows up into a woman who can't resist stabbing random people with a huge shard of glass. That's some classic slasher logic right there. Anyway, Glass Shard Stabby-Stab Girl (I can't remember her actual name) gets a role in a play and sets about killing co-stars, director, a film critic and anyone else who happens be near.

One slightly bizarre thing about this movie is that the kills are filmed in a way which hides the killer's identity. They're all first person POV shot, followed by a close-up of a murderous hand clutching a glass shard which strikes down then we cut to the carnage. This approach would make perfect sense if we didn't already know who the killer was, but here it seems a tad redundant. Still, the kills themselves are plentiful and are all suitably graphic and sadistic, including one boundary-pushing murder of a naked woman where we see the whole shebang, blood dripping off breasts and through pubic thatch. It's tasteless, crude, misogynistic - all that good stuff.

The 80's was responsible for a number of atrocities like big hair, Reaganomics and Wham's Last Christmas. But it also gave us an abundance of movies like this one that possess that special slasher vibe that only ever really existed during mankind's tackiest decade. Truth be told, it's not a particularly good film but, like an extra-cheesy pizza, it's enough to leave you full and with greasy drool dripping off your chin.

This extremely weak Australian excuse for a motion picture is sort of like the Pavlov Dog Experiment amongst horror movies. You remember this famous "Conditioned Reflex" experiment from your school books, right? The Russian scientist Pavlov proved that dogs tended to salivate before the food actually came into their mouths and this through repetitive routines stimulating the animal's reflexes. Pavlov rung a bell a couple of instants before the food was delivered to the dog and, after a while, he became anxious and excited and already started salivating from hearing the sound of the bell. What the hell has this whole boring explanation in common with a sleazy and low-budgeted Aussie slasher flick, I hear you think? Well, the modus operandi of the maniacal killer in "Nightmares" is an exact variant on Pavlov's experiment. Each and every single murder sequence is preceded by the raw sound and image of the killer breaking a window, because he/she insists on using a sharp piece of glass to slice up the victims. So this means that, after a short while, inattentive and bored viewers can afford to doze off and simply look up again when they hear the sound of shattering glass. That way they still don't miss anything special!

Regarding the quality of "Nightmares" as a film I can be very brief. This is a cheap, uninspired and largely imbecilic Aussie cash-in on the contemporary popular trend of American slasher movies. In the early 60's, a four-year-old witnesses the cruel death of her mother as her throat gets slit open in a nasty car accident. Twenty years later the same girl – Helen Selleck – is a successful stage actress, but she still has severe mental issues and regularly suffers from horrible flashbacks and traumatic nightmares. She auditions for a role in a black comedy play revolving on death and gets the part. Shortly after the big premiere, everyone who's even remotely involved with the production gets slaughtered. It is truly retarded how this movie attempts to uphold the mystery regarding the killer's identity and motivations even though even the most infantile viewer can figure it out after the first murder already. I don't think I've ever seen a more obvious whodunit than "Nightmares" and the creators should have just showed his/her face straight away and save themselves from embarrassment. The murders are explicit and very bloody and there's also an unhealthy large amount of gratuitous nudity to "enjoy". However, the production values are poor and thus the movie is never at one point shocking or provocative. The few clips we get to see of the actual play make it appear that it quite possible could be the worst thing ever performed on stage. The only positive elements in the film are the characters of the director and the gay newspaper critic, whom are both delightfully sarcastic and insult the rest of the cast members as much as we do. "Nightmares" is a dreadful piece of exploitative horror cinema, but hey, at least I gave you a golden tip to make it more digestible.

This is an Aussie attempt at a slasher movie and unlike it's American counterparts, this one has a shed load of nudity and sex, the story tells of a disturbed young woman who is triggered into murdering people when they have sex , a prologue reveals that the girl's mum was a bit loose in her ways and was killed by accident by the daughter in a car crash , the daughter is then rejected by her dad and placed into care , the girl then kills her foster dad with a shard of glass , move to the present day (1980) and she is now an aspiring actress and finds that the people she is acting with are being murdered in horrible ways with pieces of glass , it's no secret who the killer is as it's made obvious on the poster, the DVD and Blu ray releases , The stabbings are nasty , the nudity gratuitous (mostly with people you wouldn't want to see naked ) but it's all so lacklustre and by the numbers

Sweet, but troubled and repressed theater actress Helen Selleck (a solid and charming performance by the lovely Jenny Neumann) is still suffering from severe trauma over the horrific death of her mother that she witnessed when she was a little girl. A series of brutal stabbing murders besets the production of the latest play Helen is acting in. Director John D. Lamond and writer Collin Eggleston whip up a delightfully raw and in-your-face wired cinematic cocktail of unflinchingly graphic violence along with equally explicit quasi-pornographic sex and abundant nudity that's so blithely crass and leering that one can't help but be amused and entertained by the cheeky audacity of this seedy enterprise; this honey's unapologetic wallowing in the slimy celluloid sewer and unwavering furious energy in turn give it a deliriously seamy buzz that's an absolute sordid joy to behold. Moreover, it's acted with real zest by an able cast, with especially stand-out work from Gary Sweet as earnest and likable soap opera thespian Terry Besanko, Nina Landis as snippy, but incompetent diva Judy, John Michael Howson as acerbic gay critic Bennett Collingswood, Max Phipps as tough and exacting director George D'ahlberg, Edmund Pegge as vain hack actor Bruce, and Briony Behets as blundering stage manager Angela. Gary Wapshott's sumptuous widescreen cinematography makes neat use of titled camera angles and smooth gliding Steadicam tracking shots. Brian May's spirited shuddery score keeps things bounding along. Clocking in at a tight 80 minutes, this movie never becomes dull or overstays its welcome. However, the killer's identity is thuddingly obvious from the get-go, which alas undermines the tension to a considerable degree. That quibble aside, this one overall sizes up as a tremendous amount of infectiously sleazy fun.

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** I have the VidAmerica label with the title STAGE FRIGHT. A girl witnesses one of her parents having an affair and inadvertantly causes their death during a car accident. Later, she tries out for a play and all the actors start dying. Is she doing it? The identity of the killer is pretty obvious and there is no point in classifying this film as a mystery. There are too many hints as to who the killer is.

*SPOILERS*

The killer hates sex, and during two different sex scenes, murders both people, showing the most anger towards the female as one gets it with a dirty wine bottle and the other gets it with a knife on the streets of Sydney while being totally naked. We know it's Helen doing it because every time someone gets killed (especially, the woman) she has flashbacks towards the affair she saw her mother having. So, with every person she kills, she's really killing her mother all over again (sort of like a SWEET SIXTEEN type premise).

With that said, STAGE FRIGHT isn't a bad film. It has all the typical horror film aspects that hardcore fans enjoy, including, but not limited to gratuitous sex and nudity, some of the nastiest deaths you will ever see using the nastiest weapons (for example, the killer uses whatever they can find, like germ-infested plastic bags that you can only imagine where they've been and broken bottles that have street waste, etc. on them). ***out of****Americans don't come to expect much from foreign horror, but STAGE FRIGHT delivers the goods in explicit fashion that only those with strong stomachs could take.

We start things off with a little girl named Cathy who has some, shall we say, "issues" about sex and intimacy. One rainy night, Cathy's in the backseat of a car and the man in the front seat gets too handsy with mom so Cathy freaks out, the car crashes, and mom shoots through the windshield. If you're playing along at home, this means Cathy's intimacy issues now get wrapped up with broken glass issues. Keep that in mind.

Flash forward years later to an aspiring actress named Helen. She gets cast in a new play where she meets a cute costar, a jerk of a director, and lots of even worse people. I didn't get that it was a secret that Cathy grew up to be Helen, but just in case it was supposed to be a secret, Helen is Cathy. And then people start to die by getting stabbed by broken glass. It's very easy to figure out the killer and then there's a "surprise" ending and then we're done.

Stage Fright aka Nightmares is listed as an early Ozsploitation slasher but it's really more like a late-period giallo, albeit one without any real mystery to it. The violence is pretty tame but the nudity is pretty graphic. It's not scary or even particularly interesting other than as a historical document if you're a slasher fan.

"Nightmares", a.k.a. "Stage Fright", is an Australian entry into the slasher film boom of the late 70s and 80s. Jenny Neumann ("Hell Night"), giving a thoroughly inane performance, stars as Helen Selleck, who as a child had caused the car accident that killed her (adulterous) mother. Now, as a 20-something woman, Helen is a struggling theater actress, trying to satisfy demanding director George D'alberg (Max Phipps, "Mad Max 2") and tentatively responding to the affections of co-star Terry Besanko (Gary Sweet, 'Police Rescue'). Then a mad killer turns up and starts slaughtering almost everybody in the company.

"Nightmares" was written by Colin Eggleston ("Long Weekend") and directed by John D. Lamond ("Felicity"), who do understand the requirements of the sub-genre, so they make it especially violent and include a decent amount of sex & nudity. There are also the expected chase scenes, and the killer does a lot of heavy breathing. Eggleston & Lamond also make this VERY off-kilter right from the start, what with the camera angles and the close-ups and the surrealism of early scenes. They don't even TRY to make their thin story a mystery, as the resolution is painfully obvious from the get-go. That said, it's sufficiently amusing for aficionados of slashers and Ozploitation, if NOTHING I would exactly call "good". Even the score by the usually reliable Brian May is rather over the top and not particularly effective.

Punctuated by some hilariously awful theater performances, "Nightmares" is watchable enough, and fairly fast-paced, wrapping up in a trim 80 minutes.

Eggleston based his script on an "idea" by Lamond and co-star John-Michael Howson ("Second Time Lucky"), who plays the role of the critic to perfection.

Six out of 10.

This is clearly a bad film, but I can't help watching it when there's nothing better to do. A lot of bad movies are like that, right? "Nightmares" concerns Jenny Neumann slashing people to death with broken glass for seemingly no reason. She caused her mother's death by accident when she was a kid because she didn't like her cheating with another man, and now goes out to deal her own kind of warped justice on young lovers and her fellow cast in some stage show she is acting in.

The plot doesn't seem to go anywhere other than to make sure the rest of the characters are killed off. The crew also try and put a great deal of effort into disguising who the killer is, but it's blatantly obvious from the start. The nauseating POV shots become completely ridiculous in the end, with the camera just meandering through dark halls for at least two minutes for no reason. At one point, the shot even freezes for five seconds! The lighting is absolutely horrendous, and most of the time it is too dark to see what is going on. The camera seems to like to stay focused on empty corridors and rooms, and then pan slightly to a doorway to show a character entering or exiting. Why not have the camera on the door the whole time? It's very hard to ignore all this shoddy work, and really drags the film down.

There is quite a bit of blood and gore, and the effects are actually quite good. Jenny Neumann certainly adds beauty to the film also, but it isn't enough to save this murky disaster. Pity really. Anyway, not a good film at all, but certainly not the worst horror flick out there.

.In January 1963, Helen sees her mother getting off with another man, a month later, mistaking her playful banter for being hurt, she inadvertently causes a car crash killing the mother. Now in the present, Helen is an aspiring actress who obviously has some issues. Meanwhile, there's some psycho murdering those who show too much PDAs. What are the chances that these are connected? Fairly likely.

Well that was needlessly convoluted. the girl who played Helen DID affectively play a nutter, but the rest of the film was a mess. Less than halfway in, I found my interest waning exponentially (never a good sign) Culminating in one of the most unsatisfying endings that I've seen in quite some time.

My grade: D

Eye Candy: Sue Jones & Rosanna Zuanetti show everything, meanwhile Angela bares only her bottom