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Nightmares
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| Year: |
1980
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Director: |
John D. Lamond
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| Stars: |
Jenny Neumann, Gary Sweet, Nina Landis, Max Phipps, John Michael Howson, Edmund Pegg, Sue Jones, Adele Lewin, Briony Behets, Maureen Edwards, Byron Williams, Peter Tulloch, Malcolm Steed, Denise Peterson, Tania Uren
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| Genre: |
Horror, Trash |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Back in 1963, an event shaped the life of Helen Selleck (Jenny Neumann) forever. As a little girl, she had already stumbled upon seeing her parents making love in their bedroom, but one night when she was told to leave for her gran's house with her mother, who bundled her into the back of the car wrapped in a blanket, and told her to go to sleep. However, along the journey her mother had picked up a man who was not Jenny's father and he started to seduce the woman as she drove - was this in fact the man she had seen in the bedroom? Shocked, the girl started kicking at her mother who promptly crashed the car and went straight through the windscreen...
Should have worn a seatbelt, I suppose, but this wasn't a public information film, it was a slasher movie from John D. Lamond, an Australian director better known for his softcore sex movies such as Felicity or the more broadly comedic Pacific Banana. Nightmares, also distributed as Stage Fright, had a dose of nudity in it as well, some of which looked less like storytelling imperatives and more like something to pad out an already slim running time, as we jump forward from Jenny's childhood trauma where she has been told in no uncertain terms that she killed her mother (tough love?) to the present, that was 1980, for what looks like a remake of Pete Walker's early British slasher The Flesh and Blood Show.
This is set in a theatre where a frankly impenetrable play is being staged by an authoritarian writer and director (Max Phipps), and Jenny, now an actress, auditions then wins a role in it. But there is another part of the opening flashback that may be significant, which was when the little girl was in a bedroom and some man tried to kiss her, whereupon she stabbed him in the neck with with a broken glass tumbler. Did this actually happen or is she suffering, you know, nightmares? The notable thing about this slasher was that it set itself up as a mystery, so if you've seen a few of these you will be unsurprised to learn someone is stalking the theatre and bumping off the staff and performers.
On the other hand, while Lamond was keen to keep the killer's face off camera, he was actually building up to a twist that was no twist at all, as the story plays out precisely as you would have expected, and indeed were told, which might have been a bold move and perhaps a surprise in itself, but was not so much playing cleverly with the tropes of the genre and more displaying lack of imagination. However, you'd be best not to criticise Nightmares too much, because the director had a way of dealing with critics for one of the characters is one such reviewer, based on a man who had offered Lamond's work some harsh words so here was incarnated as a crippled, vindictive, predatory homosexual who doesn't write to be constructive but to make mean comments about the productions he's reviewing.
So you can guess what happens to him, though it doesn't exactly paint Lamond in a noble light, but then what you would actually want from a horror movie such as this, an Ozploitation flick as they were later known, was plenty of lurid scenes and on that level he was happy to deliver, even if they were more for pure effect than making any kind of sense. Once the first murder occurs in the building, you might have thought the police would insist the production be closed while they investigated, but we hardly see them and everyone carries on with the bare minimum of worry, adding to the bizarre tone of people not quite behaving normally. Jenny gets a boyfriend in fellow actor Terry (Gary Sweet), as the killer, whoever that could possibly be, hint hint, sets about depleting the cast, always with a shard of broken glass which is handy for their purposes. One of those shockers where people were directed only to get into setpieces of sex and violence no matter the crushing lack of reason, there was a gusto here, but it was a mess; still, some fans like that chaos. Music by Brian May.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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