NIGHTMARES (1980): All Sleaze And No Suspense Makes A Dull Slasher

Despite a hand­ful of clas­sics that are beloved to hor­ror fans of a cer­tain age, the slasher flick boom of the 1980’s was defined by a cer­tain medi­oc­rity.  For every gem in this sub­genre, you can name another three or four genre entries that range from “just pass­able” to actively bad.  The bar­rage of film­mak­ers that tack­led this sub­genre, most dri­ven by a gold-rush men­tal­ity, made too many sim­i­lar vari­a­tions on a sim­ple set of ele­ments too quickly for the slasher flick to main­tain a con­sis­tency of qual­ity  - and the bad entries can really hurt.

One of the worst entries to emerge dur­ing that early-1980’s gold rush period of the slasher film was Nightmares, a rare Aussie entry into the genre.  On paper, it seems like a decent premise: Helen Selleck (Jenny Neumann) is a young aspir­ing actress who gets a role in the stage pro­duc­tion of a com­edy.  This means she’s got a lead actor who’s try­ing to romance her in the form of Terry (Gary Sweet) and a dictator-styled direc­tor (Max Phipps) who’s going to give her a hard time.

However, Helen’s got prob­lems no one else in the play knows about: a pro­logue reveals a child­hood trauma where she acci­den­tally caused the death of her adul­ter­ous mother in a car crash.  She’s dogged by flashes of the past trauma as she tries to grip with the rig­ors of act­ing — and the director’s psyche-battering tech­niques only make it worse.  Pretty soon, a mys­te­ri­ous slasher begins bump­ing off peo­ple on the periph­ery of the pro­duc­tion — and it looks like Helen and her cowork­ers are the next vic­tims in line.

Unfortunately for the viewer, this sim­ple but work­able premise is crushed by the often baf­fling treat­ment it gets from the cast and crew.  The first offender in Nightmares is the awful script from Colin Eggleston, who is bet­ter known for direct­ing the Aussie revenge-of-nature favorite Long Weekend.  You’d never guess he had a clas­sic on his resume from his work here: the char­ac­ter­i­za­tions are as flimsy as they are unpleas­ant, the struc­ture is too loose for its own good and the story doesn’t even try to set up any red her­rings to obscure who the all-too-obvious killer is.

The cast seems at odds with the mate­r­ial.  Neumann is down­right awful as the trau­ma­tized hero­ine: her char­ac­ter is sup­posed to have a split per­son­al­ity but Neumann’s work is uni­formly flat when por­tray­ing either side of it.  When she’s required to show hys­te­ria — par­tic­u­larly in a scene where she is sup­posed to cry then laugh dur­ing a rehearsal — she’s unin­ten­tion­ally hilari­ous.  Sweet is pass­able as her love inter­est but seems way too chip­per to fit into the film’s sce­nario.  Most of the sup­port­ing cast fades into the back­ground but Phipps is good in an arch role as the nasty direc­tor and John Michael Howson gives his flam­boy­ant all to a role as a crip­pled, bitchy, cor­rupt and bisex­ual the­ater critic (the direc­tor was really work­ing out his issues with crit­ics on this film).

The direc­tion doesn’t help much.  Director John Lamond was bet­ter known for erotic, often comedic fare — Felicity and Pacific Banana, to name a few — and he’s an uncom­fort­able fit with the hor­ror genre.  He can repli­cate the sur­face tics of its style — Garry Wapshall’s prowl­ing steadicam pho­tog­ra­phy shame­lessly apes Halloween and Brian May’s blood-and-thunder score cribs from Psycho — but there’s no inspi­ra­tion in his work beyond try­ing to ful­fill the demands of the slasher flick marketplace.

The one dis­tin­guish­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of Nightmares is its high sleaze fac­tor.  Slasher movies are often attacked for offer­ing a “have sex and die” mes­sage.  Lamond not only plays into this assump­tion, he does so with balls-out bravado: there’s not one but two scenes in which naked, cop­u­lat­ing cou­ples are blood­ily slashed up by the film’s psy­cho.  These knife-facilitated moments of coitus inter­rup­tus are mem­o­rably over the top — but they also show a des­per­a­tion that per­vades the rest of this weak, trend-chasing film.

In short, Nightmares is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff as far as slash­ers go.  Even genre afi­ciona­dos will want to hold off on this one until they’ve exhausted their other options.

[Titles Confusion Department: please note that this film is not be con­fused with 1983’s Nightmares, which is a hor­ror anthol­ogy fea­tur­ing Emilio Estevez and Lance Henriksen.  There’s also another Stage Fright — which has a sim­i­lar plot with a slasher attack­ing the rehearsal of a play — but that’s an Italian film from 1987 directed by Argento pro­tégé Michele Soavi… and if you con­fuse either film with Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, well, you’re just not pay­ing attention.]