News

Nightmares

Directed by John Lamond

Screenplay by Colin Eggleston

1980, USA

The Italians might have done it best but the Aussies sure did have a good time trying. As unstable as a one-legged pirate walking a tightrope, Nightmares (directed by Ozploitation guru John Lamond) isn’t shy about what it’s doing. From the opening scene we are bombarded with an erratic pace and a pulsating score which quickly informs us that we are in for one hell of a ride. The film opens with a set of flashbacks, where we see Hellen Selleck (Jenny Neumann) subject to two early childhood traumatic experiences. The first, which in some way causes the second, is of a young Helen discovering her mother and her lover having sex. Helen’s initial need for mommy to reinforce that there are no bogeymen under her bed is quickly put on the backburner by a more current and real fear,...

Like many cheapo slasher films in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween, the 1980 Ozploitation obscurity Nightmares follows the expected pattern: Two attractive young people steal away for a quickie, take off their clothes, fool around for a while, then get hacked to death by faceless killer. But just when the rinse-and-repeat formula is growing agonizingly stale, veteran director John Lamond does something truly audacious. As yet another topless nymphet flees from the killer, she emerges in a dark alleyway in the middle of a downpour, and along comes a shadowy figure with a shard of glass, stabbing her ...

There used to be a time when exploitation films ran amok in the world of cinema. They still appear today, in franchises like Hostel and the Saw. They can be tricky to slap an exact definition on, but you will know an exploitation film if you see one. And if you see one, you'll notice how difficult it is to determine whether or not the filmmaker accomplished his or her goal in making it. I.e., you might be disgusted by the violence in Hostel or Saw, but it's not as if the director accidentally filmed the guy getting his penis chopped off.

Back in 1980, Australian director John Lamond gave us Nightmares, a story about Helen Selleck (Jenny Neumann), a young actress who is struggling to get along in the world having been emotionally crippled as a child. When she was about seven or eight years old, she walked in on her mom doing it.

DVD Playhouse June 2011

By

Allen Gardner

Kiss Me Deadly (Criterion) Robert Aldrich’s 1955 reinvention of the film noir detective story is one of cinema’s great genre mash-ups: part hardboiled noir; part cold war paranoid thriller; and part science- fiction. Ralph Meeker plays Mickey Spillane’s fascist detective Mike Hammer as a narcissistic simian thug, a sadist who would rather smash a suspect’s fingers than make love to the bevvy of beautiful dames that cross his path. In fact, the only time you see a smile cross Meeker’s sneering mug is when he’s doling out pain, with a vengeance. When a terrified young woman (Cloris Leachman, film debut) literally crossed Hammer’s path one night, and later turns up dead, he vows to get to the bottom of her brutal demise. One of the most influential films ever made, and perhaps the most-cited film by the architects...

Three cult shockers from the ’70s and early ’80s—Ed Hunt’s killer-kids opus Bloody Birthday (pictured), Ted Post’s twisted family drama The Baby and Australian director John Lamond’s slasher flick Nightmares—are all coming to special-edition DVD June 28, and we got the scoop on the contents of all three discs. See ’em past the jump with the cover art.

Severin Films, good friends of fans of horror/exploitation/trash cinema, continue to add impressive titles to their already drool-inducing library. With releases such as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (which you can win a Blu-ray copy of via our contest) and Ozploitation auteur Brian Trenchard-Smith’s BMX Bandits right around the corner, a blog post appeared on the Severin site today announcing the future release of Bloody Birthday, John D. Lamond’s Nightmares (1980), and The Baby (1973). Check out some info about the films and the first hints of special features after the break!

Read more on Severin Films announces DVD releases of Bloody Birthday, Nightmares, and The Baby…...

Welcome to the first installment of a new column here at Fangoria.com, Back Catalogue. Sometimes the Catalogue will cover new releases of older films, and sometimes it will feature exactly what the title implies, back catalogue items. These will normally be from smaller specialty labels that have formed the backbone of the horror fans ability to build a truly representative collection of their favorite films. I'm proud to start this column back up after a two year hiatus and promise to work hard to recommend films that you're in danger of forgetting about, have maybe never heard of, or that might be ready to go out of print.

I'm also proud that the first edition of Catalogue is all about Synapse Films. Anybody who goes to conventions and has stopped by the Synapse table has not only seen first hand the amazing array of labor of love releases and Special Editions they produce,...