Night of Fear (1973)

You won't be disappointed!

the audience applauded

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Before Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and way before WOLF CREEK, was this little Aussie treasure of sheer gore and stupidity of the Z-grade kind. What I admire about this film is the lack of dialogue, so there was no Aussie twang to cringe about. The effective campy horror suspense music with the wild and sometimes abstract editing made it more engrossing.If you peel away all the zany technical aspects of the movie and look at the bare bones, you are left with the hammy performances which was perfect for this slasher. On top of that was the very thin storyline, about a woman who loses her way in the Aussie bush and comes across this mad man who plays a game of cat and mouse with her. Nothing creative in the telling of this story, but still good ole trashy slasher fun.The highlight for me was those freaky cuts to naked bodies and sacrificial sex scenes, which almost made it very close to being an experimental slasher film. Maybe if it was recut to ten minutes, then this could have been a great experimental short film of the bizarre kind!

This is a fairly tedious little would-be shocker, filled with creative camera angles that only really serve to obscure what is going on on- screen, and surprises you can see coming a mile away. It generates no tension, but does feature creative set design.It features a girl terrorized by a crazed, limping hermit who she encounters after running off the road. His Texas Chainsaw Massacre- style abode is filled with the usual things you find in serial killer's houses in the movies, like disembodied doll heads, animal skulls and newspaper clippings about crimes on the walls that I guess we are supposed to assume the owner perpetrated. The thing is that this guy doesn't exactly live in the backwoods. The girl found him after running off a main road, so why haven't the police?I feel like giving credit for an ending I wasn't expecting, though if that's due to creativity on the filmmaker's part, or improbability on the part of the plot, I'm not entirely sure. Wouldn't being gnawed on by rats wake a person up after a dizzy spell? And wouldn't it take a lot more to kill a person?This did get there before Texas Chainsaw, and I wonder if Tobe Hooper saw it. He certainly improved on the formula.

Just when you're thinking of the worst movies you've ever seen, along comes this grade Z clunker zooming into the frame! Anyone who is aware of this Aussie film will know that it was banned by the censors for a long time. It's a pity, in many ways, that the censors eventually relented, as depriving viewers of catching up with this dross would have been something of a bonus. In reality, it has very little in its favour. Okay, it may well be the first Australian horror movie, and a pre-runner of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it doesn't take very long to become monotonous and downright irritating. The actors couldn't have been too concerned about learning their lines, as there simply arn't any. It's probably the horror equivalent of "The Plank"!! Put simply, this is a total waste of time.

My knowledge of Australian horror cinema isn't exactly encyclopaedic, but apparently, this is the first Oz horror film. Night of Fear was originally intended to be the first episode in a twelve part Australian TV horror series, but because Australian censors deemed it 'too gory', it never saw the light of day; until its DVD release some years later. The film definitely is nastier than your average TV show, and it's not really surprising that it never got shown on television. There is no dialogue at all in the film, although this is masked by a barrage of tense and macabre scenes that our young heroine terrorised by a madman. While the film does well in the violence and gore stakes, I personally don't rate it as a masterpiece simply because there isn't all that much to it. The film only lasts for fifty minutes, so you can't expect too much - but the unrelenting pace can become monotonous. You've got to respect writer-director Terry Bourke for attempting to bring horror to Australian TV screens and having his attempt dismissed for featuring too much horror, but personally I'd rather have seen him put his efforts into a more ambitious feature length film instead, and I'll endeavour to see his later efforts such as 'Inn of the Damned'.