NIGHTMARES

Nightmares

Little Cathy has been having a shit couple of weeks. First she walks in on mommy and daddy having sex. Then mommy is sent headfirst through a windshield during a car accident while Cathy is in the backseat. Then everyone blames her for her mommy's death - mommy accidentally slit her throat as little Cathy tried to pull her back into the car. Then Cathy is assaulted by a male nurse, an episode that makes Cathy lash out at the man, cutting his face with a shard of broken glass. Yep, Cathy's been having a shit couple of weeks indeed.


But 16 years later, Cathy has grown up considerably. She has changed her name to Helen, has blossomed into a beautiful young woman (played by the lovely Jenny Neumann) with dreams of becoming a stage actress, and has just landed an audition for a role in a tragic comedic play about death. She gets the part and attracts the attention of the leading man, a television soap opera actor named Terry. Everything seems to be going well except that Helen is still suffering from horrible nightmares and the desire to slash people to ribbons with shards of glass every time they upset her or if she happens to stumble across them making love.


Nightmares

As opening night comes and goes and the production starts to receive popular support, Helen's problems begin to worsen. Tensions among the cast and director grow hotter and people begin to worry about the frequency with which their fellow troupe members are dropping dead or disappearing. Will Helen be able to control her quickly worsening psychosis? Will anyone catch on before it's too late, or will Helen continue to cut up the cast and crew into fleshy confetti? I seriously doubt you'll care either way.


OK, here's the deal. If it weren't for its inclusion in Mark Hartley's excellent documentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF OZPLOITATION! I doubt anyone would even know about this film. It had a bit of a reputation among horror fans as being a pretty sleazy and nasty affair, but the truth is the film is anything but. It's slow. It's talky. It's poorly performed and, frankly, quite dull. It tries to be more than it is. It tries damn hard to disguise its slasher film roots with bits and pieces of psychodrama and comedy, but there isn't enough there to lift the film out of the shadows of better, more successful slasher films.


Nightmares

The film does two things very, very wrong. For starters, every time the film kicks off a murder set-piece, the camera adopts the typical killer POV shot often found in these kinds of films. Now this is a technique used primarily in slasher films as a method to hide the identity of the killer. While it's totally appropriate in scores of other films, with NIGHTMARES it's completely pointless. We already know who the killer is so the inclusion of countless POV sequences serves no purpose whatsoever. The other problem has to do with the editing of the film, in particular the editing of the murder set-piece. NIGHTMARES is simply one of the worst edited films I have ever seen. The murder set-pieces are the most important elements of any slasher film and a film is going to rise or fall on their success. The murders in this film are the most confusing bits. It's nigh impossible to tell what's going on. There are moments in this film when I literally had no idea where characters were in relation to one another, if the shot I'm watching was a part of the POV sequence or apart from it, or whether or not the killer had even managed to land a blow. Several times in this film we would have a shot of an actor, followed by a reverse shot of a black-gloved hand stabbing with a piece of glass (complete with sound effects of the glass hitting flesh), and then followed by another shot of the actor simply walking away unharmed. It's an absolute mess. Whatever else the film does right (the scoring, for example, is fantastic), these two problems sink the whole film.


Nightmares

It's pretty much universally accepted that there are three distinct kinds of slasher films out there. The "terror film", where the killer is a unique identity and the thrills lie in whether or not the cast make it out alive. Then there's the "psycho killer" film, where the killer is the films main character. And then there's the giallo-esque "whodunit" slasher film, which plays out like a "terror film" with an added bit of intrigue surrounding the killer's identity. NIGHTMARES does not seem to be satisfied with just picking one and running with it. Instead, it tries to mix elements from all three. The problem with that approach is that the three kinds of films cannot be reconciled with one another. The films writer, Colin Eggleston (director of the outstanding LONG WEEKEND), tries to inject a few red herrings along the way (such as Helen arguing with an unseen woman in her apartment), but the film is so blunt and has no subtlety to it. We're well aware of who the killer is. That simple fact destroys any sense of intrigue. And because Helen remains unaware, for the most part, of her murder sprees, we cannot follow that down the rabbit hole of the "psycho killer" film. There's no suspense here, no psychological intrigue, no nothing. It's just a hollow, uneven mess of a film.


Still, NIGHTMARES will satisfy slasher fans (it's hard not to, after all) with its gratuitous, and rather explicit at times, bouts of sex and its sadistic, blood-drenched violent moments. Everyone else will probably walk away confused and disappointed. I would highly recommend anyone interested in seeing this film to check out Mark Hartley's documentary first. It manages to include all the good bits and pieces of NIGHTMARES. That means you can see why the film gained its slight air of notoriety without having to suffer its incompetence. Life's too short to spend it watching this film.


Not recommended.