Nightmares Review

Just when I think I’m going to get a winning movie full of all the things that I enjoy from the scary movie genre, I get hosed bad. The movie I’m going to review today is a movie that was originally titled “Stage Fright”, but has been changed into the working title “Nightmares”. When I first started watching this, my ears nearly started to bleed, because the accents. I thought for sure I had entered the realm of a British horror movie. Then I scrambled and realized that this was not a British favorite, it was none other than another Ozploitation film, much in the vein of Argento or Bava. With that in mind, I went forth and was completely bored with the 80 minutes of slow moving, piece of crap movie that stars Jenny Neumann.

The movie opens up in a weird way. A young girl discovers her mom getting it on with a random dude. The first thing that I noticed was how tame the lovemaking was. If lovemaking were this tame in real life, I’d be a eunuch. In fact, it’s so bad that I swear the two didn’t even go through middle school health class. This of course traumatizes the little kid, and we fast forward to another place and time. On a dark road we are presented with another odd story.

We see the girl in the back of a car while her mom and her boyfriend or some dude start kissing up in the front seat. They continue to make out much to the child’s protest, and when she forces her hand, kaboom! Mom goes through the windshield and we are treated with some sick gore, and awesome moments of terror. But after this set up, we get roughly 40 minutes of boredom, and I forget why I submit to random crap.

We fast forward to the present time and the girl is now an older woman and an actress and when the body count of her drama peers starts to rise, she thinks that she is the one…but really it’s not what she thinks at all.

Another slow moving movie from the 1980s, and this one comes to us from the Australian film industry, which is usually on point with their exploitation stuff. This film just suffers from pacing, bad acting, and terrible narrative. The story is there somewhere, but it lacks that push that Bava or Argento had when they were making their classic mystery horror pieces. If you’re expecting gore, nudity, or anything else that made this a grindhouse instant classic, it’s void. You are going to be bored, much like I was, and unless you’re a diehard horror movie collector, you most likely are going to avoid this one.

Nightmares is really not a great movie, but it’s not the worst I’ve ever seen. Check it out if you have nothing better to watch, or you’re at work and the website you work on goes down for a few hours. Other than that, pass on this, but hey, buy the dvd from the links provided, I need the money and you need to get a good collection of movies up.



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