Nightmares (1980)

Too much of everything

Pretty Good

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

F you are in a 1980's slasher movie and have kids, never let them see you have sex. Chances are, you are either going to die or they are going to grow up to be complete maniacs. Possibly both!Cathy (Jenny Neumann, Hell Night) is one of those kids. When she was little, she caught her mom having sex in a really weird position that didn't look plausible. And then, her mom's boyfriend was making out with her while they drove in the car. She tried to get them to stop. However, she caused her mother's death in a car crash, with a piece of glass ending up in her throat.Sixten years later and Cathy has become Helen. She's an actress in a play called Comedy of Blood, but everyone keeps getting killed with shards of glass. There's no real guesswork here - you can pretty much figure out the killer from the first few moments of the movie.All I have to recommend this movie on is that Brian May did the soundtrack and that it is also called Stagefright, but you'd be much better off watching the Soavi film of the same name. It's so much better that at the end of this movie, I kept wondering, "Why am I not watching the real Stagefright?"

"Nightmares" is a dire, tedious and dirty attempt at a slasher movie that can't even be bothered with a twist in the tail.The only thing - absolutely the only thing - that you'll remember about this movie is the sex. It has more of that than probably any slasher movie I've seen, and it's quite graphic, including a close up shot of a man's hand mauling a woman's pudenda.Aside from this nothing in the movie connects because it is so stupid and absurd. The killer is a young woman, a starlet in a play. All of the killings happen from POV shots except for when she raises the murder weapon - a shard of glass - in the air. More than once she kills her victims two at a time, so why don't they make any attempt to fight back? They scream, recoil, and get slashed up. Blood goes everywhere, but the killings are not particularly graphic. The budget went on actors willing to get naked, it seems, and allowed to room for visible wounds, so all we end up with is fake blood smeared on naked bodies.I could hardly wait for this movie to be over, so I contemplated things like how the play could continue while its cast of only five people is already missing two actors, at least one of which has been discovered murdered in the theatre itself. The effort to find the killer is so lax that detectives allow the other cast and director into the crimescene so that they can watch from the seats as they go about their job of questioning one of the actors, and then disappear from the movie permanently so that subsequent performances can happen, minus the actor who got killed. Presumably the public has heard about the murder. Why are they so keen to enter the theatre where someone was brutally murdered yesterday and no one knows who did it?This is the kind of movie where people take a long time to die from POV shots so that we can see them scream, get slahed up, run away, continue to get slashed up... but then other characters die immediately from one stab if they happen to be in a crowded place so that no one around can tell they've been killed. It's as though the filmmakers realise no one who watches such a movie will care enough to notice such inconsistencies and unrealities. Or perhaps they think the audience isn't bright enough to get it.The existence of such a movie, therefore, is an insult to anyone who has to sit through it, on top of everything else.

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.

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.