Nightmares is one of those better horror films with an intriguing premise. Causing an accident which took the life of her mother, when she was a little girl, now an adult, the horrific visual memory, that 63 night, of seeing her mother thrown through a windscreen, at the sound of splintering glass, leads her on a series of killings, using shards of glass. Unfortunately for the whole cast of the acting troupe, she's just joined (this includes a twentyish Garry Sweet) they are to become her latest victims. Some of them meet their fate in quite gruesome ways. Some of the violence in Nightmares is sexual too, particularly an early scene, that's quite sick, and eye shocked me the first time I saw it. It involves a naked girl in a steeet, non thespian, fleeing off, after her naked lover buys it, in the lower region I might of add. The girl becomes trapped and this shard of glass rips across her breast a couple of times, where her nakedness is soon the colour of mucky red as she scrambles away, but inevitably becomes another victim to this psycho's credit. What I loved about this scene, was that it was shot if in hand held motion, but also at different angles, all from out psycho's POV. It was really quite scary, well the first time I saw. There are a couple of scary moments here and there. Nightmares doesn't have a happy outcome. The last victim (Sweet) buys it in bed, the same place he did in Macbeth, not so violently I would imagine. Yes our psycho gets away, unscathed. Let's face it, some psychos in movies do. As an end gag, we hear our female psycho stating her name again, for she is auditioning once more. Her character being a great actress, we know she's gonna win the audition, and that means a new batch of victims. Jenny Neumann is fantastic as the taunted girl, screaming and ranting to herself, and missing stage cues, while in la la land. The rest bring in so so performances, apart from Max Phipps, great as a harsh director, who me, personally as an actor, wouldn't want to have as a director, plus his ally, evil tongued critic, John Michael Howson, also great and funny too. This guy could actually act. He's also credited with the movie's idea. Not a badly made flick, and one of the better Aussie horrors, but not a great one.

I've always thought that slashers are a sub-genre that thrives on being trashy. They're ultimately all about the kills so those kills need to be as bloody as possible, and the between-kills moments are essentially just filler so there may as well be plenty of boobage in those parts. A slasher with class is kind of like a pizza with low-fat cheese - better for you, but not as indulgent and a little bit pointless. Fortunately, Nightmares, one of the very first slashers to cash in on Halloween's success (yes, before Friday the 13th) was made by Aussie soft-porn legend John D. Lamond (the strip club guy from Not Quite Hollywood) who knows more than a thing or two about cooking up cinematic junk food.Nightmares starts with a young girl accidentally getting a peek at her mother having sex (what a slut!), before a car crash where she sees Mummy get her neck sliced open on the broken windshield. Naturally, having a childhood forged in the fires of sex and violence means that she grows up into a woman who can't resist stabbing random people with a huge shard of glass. That's some classic slasher logic right there. Anyway, Glass Shard Stabby-Stab Girl (I can't remember her actual name) gets a role in a play and sets about killing co-stars, director, a film critic and anyone else who happens be near.One slightly bizarre thing about this movie is that the kills are filmed in a way which hides the killer's identity. They're all first person POV shot, followed by a close-up of a murderous hand clutching a glass shard which strikes down then we cut to the carnage. This approach would make perfect sense if we didn't already know who the killer was, but here it seems a tad redundant. Still, the kills themselves are plentiful and are all suitably graphic and sadistic, including one boundary-pushing murder of a naked woman where we see the whole shebang, blood dripping off breasts and through pubic thatch. It's tasteless, crude, misogynistic - all that good stuff.The 80's was responsible for a number of atrocities like big hair, Reaganomics and Wham's Last Christmas. But it also gave us an abundance of movies like this one that possess that special slasher vibe that only ever really existed during mankind's tackiest decade. Truth be told, it's not a particularly good film but, like an extra-cheesy pizza, it's enough to leave you full and with greasy drool dripping off your chin.

This extremely weak Australian excuse for a motion picture is sort of like the Pavlov Dog Experiment amongst horror movies. You remember this famous "Conditioned Reflex" experiment from your school books, right? The Russian scientist Pavlov proved that dogs tended to salivate before the food actually came into their mouths and this through repetitive routines stimulating the animal's reflexes. Pavlov rung a bell a couple of instants before the food was delivered to the dog and, after a while, he became anxious and excited and already started salivating from hearing the sound of the bell. What the hell has this whole boring explanation in common with a sleazy and low-budgeted Aussie slasher flick, I hear you think? Well, the modus operandi of the maniacal killer in "Nightmares" is an exact variant on Pavlov's experiment. Each and every single murder sequence is preceded by the raw sound and image of the killer breaking a window, because he/she insists on using a sharp piece of glass to slice up the victims. So this means that, after a short while, inattentive and bored viewers can afford to doze off and simply look up again when they hear the sound of shattering glass. That way they still don't miss anything special! Regarding the quality of "Nightmares" as a film I can be very brief. This is a cheap, uninspired and largely imbecilic Aussie cash-in on the contemporary popular trend of American slasher movies. In the early 60's, a four-year-old witnesses the cruel death of her mother as her throat gets slit open in a nasty car accident. Twenty years later the same girl – Helen Selleck – is a successful stage actress, but she still has severe mental issues and regularly suffers from horrible flashbacks and traumatic nightmares. She auditions for a role in a black comedy play revolving on death and gets the part. Shortly after the big premiere, everyone who's even remotely involved with the production gets slaughtered. It is truly retarded how this movie attempts to uphold the mystery regarding the killer's identity and motivations even though even the most infantile viewer can figure it out after the first murder already. I don't think I've ever seen a more obvious whodunit than "Nightmares" and the creators should have just showed his/her face straight away and save themselves from embarrassment. The murders are explicit and very bloody and there's also an unhealthy large amount of gratuitous nudity to "enjoy". However, the production values are poor and thus the movie is never at one point shocking or provocative. The few clips we get to see of the actual play make it appear that it quite possible could be the worst thing ever performed on stage. The only positive elements in the film are the characters of the director and the gay newspaper critic, whom are both delightfully sarcastic and insult the rest of the cast members as much as we do. "Nightmares" is a dreadful piece of exploitative horror cinema, but hey, at least I gave you a golden tip to make it more digestible.

This is clearly a bad film, but I can't help watching it when there's nothing better to do. A lot of bad movies are like that, right? "Nightmares" concerns Jenny Neumann slashing people to death with broken glass for seemingly no reason. She caused her mother's death by accident when she was a kid because she didn't like her cheating with another man, and now goes out to deal her own kind of warped justice on young lovers and her fellow cast in some stage show she is acting in.The plot doesn't seem to go anywhere other than to make sure the rest of the characters are killed off. The crew also try and put a great deal of effort into disguising who the killer is, but it's blatantly obvious from the start. The nauseating POV shots become completely ridiculous in the end, with the camera just meandering through dark halls for at least two minutes for no reason. At one point, the shot even freezes for five seconds! The lighting is absolutely horrendous, and most of the time it is too dark to see what is going on. The camera seems to like to stay focused on empty corridors and rooms, and then pan slightly to a doorway to show a character entering or exiting. Why not have the camera on the door the whole time? It's very hard to ignore all this shoddy work, and really drags the film down.There is quite a bit of blood and gore, and the effects are actually quite good. Jenny Neumann certainly adds beauty to the film also, but it isn't enough to save this murky disaster. Pity really. Anyway, not a good film at all, but certainly not the worst horror flick out there.