Nightmares

In the early 80’s, slashers were everything, and they came from all over the place. Australia was no exception, as legendary exploitation filmmaker John Lamond showed us in this 1980 production. The story involves a young actress named Helen (Jenny Neumann), who saw her mother die in a car accident, along with her mother’s lover. She has become an actress and has landed a role in an Oscar Wilde-style comedy. But soon, everyone in the set is starting to die in very violent and gratuitous ways, and Helen may, or may not be, the killer. But if it isn’t her, who could it be? Someone from the past? A disgruntled PA?

Yeah that joke was stupid, but so is this movie. This is possibly the least interesting slasher I have seen, even worse than Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. Now, let me first say that there are two things that are really good about this. For starters, all the murders start with glass being broken, and all the murders are committed with a broken piece of glass. This is pretty cool and an original addition to the “trademark murder weapon” tradition of slasher films. And the murders themselves are pretty damn fucked up, with some of the most painful-looking stabbings I’ve seen in the movies. The mixture of the gore and the sound effect used really makes me feel the skin rip. And second, there is a lot of explicit nudity involved with these murders. Yes, we get two full nude scenes, and one of them is surprisingly explicit, even for a slasher film. The second one looks especially painful, however, since the woman gets herself a slash in her buttcheek. Ouch.
Even with all of this going on, however, the movie cannot be saved. The script is atrocious beyond belief and the acting for the most part is atrocious. There just isn’t enough character development in the script for me to care about anyone in the script, so the movie gets boring pretty quick, with the exception of the murder sequences. Also, is it just me, or do the scenes of the play just show what could be the worst stage play in the history of mankind? Really disturbing, in a bad way. However, I will say that if you like slashers like I do, you should hunt this film down, as it has a ton of great murders and pretty good nudity/sex. Just don’t hope for much else.