Directed by
John Lammond
90 minutes
Rated R
Reviewed by
David Michael Brown
Nightmares
Synopsis: Aspiring actress Helen Selleck (Jenny Neuman) has just landed a part in a new play. She should be happy but she is haunted by nightmares of her childhood when she caused the death of her mother. Soon people involved with the production are being brutally slashed to death with shards of glass and the cast are more worried about being killed than giving a killer performance.
With films like Felicity, Australia After Dark and The ABC Of Love: Australia Style, director John Lammond had become Australia’s smut peddler of choice. Throughout the 70s the director had taken great delight in showing his homeland what was going in between the sheets. As a new decade approached, however, Lammond’s sleazy take on entertainment had been over taken by the world of easily accessible pornography and much like the late great Russ Meyer, he tried his hand at a different genre to try and invigorate his career. Unfortunately, as with Meyer’s flirtation with the horror genre with Blacksnake, Lammond’s Nightmares fails on almost every level.
Coming after the likes of John Carpenter’s Halloween and the original Friday the 13th, the film’s biggest problem is its lack of chills. No matter what Lammond pulls out of his directorial bag of tricks, everything fails. He tries hard, the incessant point of view shots obviously try to recreate the sense of dread that Dean Cundey’s brooding camerawork achieved in Carpenter’s classic but they become repetitive far too soon. The ponderous, sub-Bernard Hermann score also does the film no favours and the performances are mediocre at best. A willingness to disrobe for Lammond’s lingering camera was obviously the main casting criteria for the actresses.
The murder scenes are nicely handled, the motif of bloodied glass against naked flesh adds a frisson of excitement but the lack of characterisation beyond the creation of nominal ciphers for the plot means that you really don’t care who shrugs off their mortal coil, or who survives for that matter. Jenny Neumann as the villainess of the peace is lacklustre, despite having appeared in the likes of the US slasher Hell Night, and the futile attempts to try and disguise the fact that she is the killer make the film even more laughable, most glaringly in the Psycho homage as she talks to her unseen mother. It’s surprising to see that the film was co-written by Colin Ecclestone who also directed the classic Long Weekend. The Carrie-style jump shock at the film’s finale shows how deficit of ideas the filmmakers’ really were with Nightmares. As vital as they are to the modern slasher film, sex and violence do not a horror film make. This is one nightmare that won’t make you scream.
Want more about this film?
Want something different?
