Severin Films

Having accidentally caused the death of her mother, Helen (Jenny Neumann) develops an unhealthy fixation with broken glass. Now an adult and an aspiring actress, she auditions for a role in an absurdist play. She gets the part, and also the attention of her handsome co-star. But then someone starts killing off the cast and crew of the play. Is it Helen?

It isn’t really venturing into spoiler territory to reveal that the answer to that question is “yes.” It is just one of the many odd aspects of this Australian slasher flick that the murders are staged in such a way (often, though not always, in first person) as to conceal the identity of the murderer, while the story makes it clear that there is only one person who could be responsible for the deaths. It then has the nerve to reveal Helen as the killer, right at the end of the film, as if this is some kind of surprise. Imagine if Halloween had concluded with the statement that “The murderer is... Michael Meyers!” and you have the idea. Meanwhile, the editing is frequently disorienting, with the 180-degree rule being violated on a number of occasions, and any sense of geography going right out the window (unless we really are supposed to believe that the critic’s home is an annex of the theatre itself). The storytelling is extremely choppy, with the film being broken up into short, barely developed scenes that have very little connective tissue between them. And as far as the plot itself goes, it’s a typical 1980 slasher in every way, just with Australian accents.
Now having said all that, the theatrical setting does add a measure of interest, and there are moments that call to mind Michele Soavi’s later Stagefright (1986). While the latter is by far the better movie, Nightmares (which was also, by coincidence, known as Stagefright) really comes alive in the rehearsal and performance scenes, with some genuinely witty barbs thrown out at the theatrical world, and some striking camera compositions tossed into the mix. So while this film will remain of interest primarily to fans of the 80s slasher movie, said fans will find just enough different here to make the film worth checking out.

Three children are born at the moment of a total solar eclipse. On the even of their tenth birthday party, we discover that these kids, for astrological reasons, are complete sociopaths, and are having a merry time offing anyone in the community who even vaguely annoys them. The only ones who even gradually suspect that something is going on are high school senior Joyce (Lori Lethen) and her little brother Timmy (K. C. Martel). They soon become the target of the psycho kids’ wrath.

As slasher films flooded the screens in the early eighties, every conceivable minor variation was tried, while the rigid narrative formula was religiously observed. So if the variation wasn’t in the date (Halloween, Friday the 13^th, New Year’s Evil, My Bloody Valentine, etc., etc., etc.), the change-up was in the the killer. And so here we have kids, though the elements remain otherwise familiar: prologue opening, young couples get naked and die, the Good Girl is the Final Girl, and so on. Though there is a bit of a nasty little punch in having the kids be murderous, this was hardly new in 1981 (The Bad Seed anyone?). The world of the film is a very difficult one to buy: the rash of murders has very little effect on the community, the junkyard features gassed-up and fully functional cars, astrology is apparently a for-credit subject at the high school, and everyone is very, very, very stupid. And while there is a certain demented pleasure in seeing tiny, WTF turns by the likes of Jose Ferrer (on-screen for maybe 30 seconds) and Susan Strasberg, this is a film that, in the final analysis, is nowhere as sick as it should be, unable to follow through on its own premise, as demonstrated by the singularly anti-climactic finale. Had this been an Italian or Spanish movie from the same era, I venture to think things would be a bit different.

Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) is a social worker with a new case, one that she specifically sought. She has been assigned to the Wadsworth family. It consists of a terrifying matriarch (Ruth Roman), sexpot daughters Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Alba (Suzanne Zenor), and Baby (David Mooney, credited as David Manzy), a grown man with, apparently, the mental development of an infant. But Ann suspects Baby is capable of more, and that there is something fundamentally wrong going on at the Wadsworth residence. The Wadsworths, meanwhile, do not take kindly to Ann’s prying, and will stop at nothing to preserve their way of life.

Viewers lured by the promise of the film’s poster (Baby in crib, hatchet in hand) will no doubt be disappointed. This is not a body-count film, and there is very little that is overtly horrific for most of the movie. But make no mistake: this is a horror film. The horror is primarily conceptual, and the more we see of Baby’s life, the more we squirm. The performances are universally strong, and we buy into the characters, no matter how grotesque they are, and believe me, they are grotesque. The climax is exquisitely sick, as only the denouement of a movie made in 1972 can be, and is meticulously set up by everything that came before. This is a screwed-up movie, and I mean that as a term of extremely high praise. Absolutely not to be missed.

Nicky Henson plays Tom, the leader of a hellraising biker gang known as the Living Dead. His goal is to make that moniker absolutely literal, and it helps that his mother (Beryl Reid) is a medium who has made some sort of Satanic pact, and the butler (George Sanders, in his final role just before his suicide) might well be an infernal power himself (his precise nature is never made clear). At any rate, all it takes to come back from the dead, apparently, is to kill oneself while firmly believing that one will return. Tom proves this formula to be correct, and soon almost all the other gang members follow suit. The one member who might hold out is his girlfriend Abby (Mary Larkin). Meanwhile, as the Living Dead embark on a reign of terror, will anyone be able to stop them?

This is a pretty odd duck of a film, and quite delightful for precisely that reason. In the first place, the Living Dead are hardly the most threatening biker gang ever to grace the silver screen, and though they do rack up quite the body count of policemen and civilians, many of their other bits of misbehaviour are not so much atrocities, but more in the line of shenanigans (as a fellow viewer aptly put it, the gang don't become flesh-eating zombies, only unkillable twits). The precise nature of Reid's motivation is never made clear, Abby is so whiny and callow that one is hard-pressed to feel any sympathy for her, and there's this strange preoccupation with the idea of the frog as an embodiment of evil. But these very oddities contribute to, rather than detract from, the film's off-kilter entertainment value. There's a wealth of incident, so the viewer is never bored, there are  some very fun chase scenes, and (which is a good thing) there is a rather knowing sense of humour about the whole affair. Definitely one of the odder horror films to emerge from England in the 1970s, and an engaging rediscovery.

Former pirate radio DJ Mike Raven plays Victor Clare (a case where the actor has a scarier name than the character he plays), reclusive artist who, one strongly suspects, has the unpleasant House-of-Wax-y propensity to pour molten metal on his models in order to bronze them. A group of characters with varying agendas gather at his Cornwall abode: his senile wife; his sexually ambivalent model; his weak, alcoholic son (Ronald Lacey, a long way from the menacing Nazi he would later play in Raiders of the Lost Ark) and impatient daughter-in-law; a neophyte art dealer and his girlfriend, Millie (Mary Maude). Victor becomes obsessed with Millie, determined make her his artistic muse. Meanwhile, the cast is being gruesomely bumped off one after the other.

Raven comes across very much as a poor man's Christopher Lee. He has the height (more or less), he has a deep voice, and he even looks not unlike Lee. But he has none of the master's screen presence, and isn't as frightening as he clearly should be. Most of the film is a rather dull plod, with characters wandering about, flirting or sniping at each other, and repeating conversations ad nauseum. The murders come along every so often to spice things up, but given Victor's obvious villainy, one might well wonder why the film is being so coy about the killings, and refusing to show us the killer.