Stage Fright

Easy to watch slasher flick with basic thin plot starring jenny neumann from hell night.

Most of the ingredients for a good horror filmare here , blood ,deaths , naked bodies and sex.

Set around a theatre company and the performance of a new play the actors and the crew are picked off one by one,quite a short film that runs at a nice pace. The acting and the string score are quite good, the killings are basic worth a watch.

Young Cathy accidentally kills her mother,who is making out with a man in the passenger seat of a car.Believing the man is hurting her mother,Cathy starts hitting him and her mother crashes the car sending her through the windshield.When an orderly tries to molest her,Cathy slashes his face with a broken glass.Years later Helen(Jenny Neumann of "Hell Night" fame)is an aspiring American actress auditioning for a Victorian comic play about death made by sarcastic director George.Soon a black gloved sex-hating killer wielding shards of glass starts killing members of theatrical play.Sleazy Australian slasher with lots of POV shots and fairly brutal glass slashings.The identity of the killer is blatantly obvious and there is a bit of graphic nudity.If you are a fan of "Flesh and the Blood Show","Theatre of Blood","Deliria" and "Opera" you may give this one a look.6 out of 10.

NIGHTMARES (aka: STAGE FRIGHT) opens with a little girl inadvertently causing a car accident in which her mother is killed. Years later, Helen (Julie Neuman) is a struggling actress, auditioning for a part in a play. Still haunted by her mum's death, Helen is very insecure and emotionally unstable.

Meanwhile, a randy, naked couple are murdered in an alley. Everything seems to point to the guilt of one person, though the killer is never shown.

While Helen is busy working on her first relationship with a man, more grisly murders occur, including the butchering of the world's most odious theater critic.

In the end, it all adds up to very little, providing no real surprises or twists. This movie is for those who simply want a blood-soaked experience with extra helpings of nudity.

TWO INTERESTING FACTS: #1- Glass always breaks in big, knife-shaped shards, suitable for murdering people! #2- Having sex can only lead to death by knife-shaped glass shards!...

Heavy on style and wacky P.O.V. shots, but very low on anything resembling a cohesive story. We're essentially told who the killer is from the start of the film, but the script tries to pretend like we don't know and keep it a mystery, but it's so obvious that it makes you wish they'd just throw any mystery out the table and just show the killer as they're doing their slashing instead of filming nearly all the murders in P.O.V. mode.

This is a rather strange early Australian attempt to ape the American slasher films, but it is only really interesting in the places where it deviates from them. It's one of a small number of slasher films that is set in a theater during a theatrical production, which not only provides a good setting, but also a lot of very worthy victims (theater actors, directors, critics, etc.) as well as a very believable reason why no one notices the initial disappearances (theater people being as self-absorbed and narcissistic as they get). Unfortunately, the back story is very lame, involving a young acting ingenue (Jenny Neumann) with a vague, troubled past (her mother died in a car accident after a sexual tryst). When she is cast in a new theater production, people start being brutally murdered. So who is the killer? Unfortunately, it's probably EXACTLY who you think it is.

The director of this movie was an unknown (at least outside Australia), but the co-writer/co-producer Collin Eggleston gave the world both the idiotic sex film "Fantasm Comes Again" and underrated nature-gone-amok thriller "Long Weekend". Jenny Neumann also appeared in American slasher semi-classic "Hell Night" where she played the English girl (you know, the one who WASN'T Linda Blair)who spends her entire screen time in bed with a guy without ever actually taking off her underwear. Regrettably, she doesn't get naked here either, but pretty much everyone else does. This movie stands apart from the rest of the slasher films in the sheer gratuitousness of its gratuitous nudity, including a LONG scene where one corpulent Aussie lass is chased butt-naked out of the theater and into the street by the killer. In this respect the movie kind of resembles Pete Walkers sexploitation/early slasher film "The Flesh and Blood Show", but it's not a patch on that one.

The film also compares pretty unfavorably with Michel Soavi's film "Stage Fright" with which it is often confused, and a lot of the decent, if micro-budgeted, horror films being made Down Under in the late 70's/early 80's. On the plus side, it's a lot better than "Cut" and some of the crap that has been seeping out of the country more recently. See it if you can find it, but don't go out of your way.