Stage Fright

1980

Action / Horror / Thriller

3
IMDb Rating 4.6/10 10 1016 1K

australian horror theater play childhood trauma ozploitation

Plot summary

A little girl named Cathy tries to keep her mother from making out with a man while driving one day, and she inadvertently causes her mother's death in the car crash. 16 years later, Cathy has changed her name to Helen and has become a psychotic actress. Things are going fine until horrible things starts to happened with the cast of her new play.

Director

John D. Lamond Photo
John D. Lamond

Top cast

Max Phipps Photo
Max Phipps as George D'alberg
Gary Sweet Photo
Gary Sweet as Terry Besanko
Jenny Neumann Photo
Jenny Neumann as Helen Selleck
Nina Landis Photo
Nina Landis as Judy
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
761.79 MB
1280*534
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 22 min
Seeds 2
1.38 GB
1920*800
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 22 min
Seeds ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by PeterMitchell-506-564364 6 / 10

Nightmarish and taunted world of a psycho

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.
Reviewed by jadavix 3 / 10

Dire horror movie, notable only for the overdose of sex

"Nightmares" is a dire, tedious and dirty attempt at a slasher movie that can't even be bothered with a twist in the tail.The only thing - absolutely the only thing - that you'll remember about this movie is the sex. It has more of that than probably any slasher movie I've seen, and it's quite graphic, including a close up shot of a man's hand mauling a woman's pudenda.Aside from this nothing in the movie connects because it is so stupid and absurd. The 'action' is set around a play where people keep getting murdered. All of the killings happen from POV shots except for when the killer raises the murder weapon - a shard of glass - in the air. More than once they kill their victims two at a time, so why isn't there any attempt to fight back? They scream, recoil, and get slashed up. Blood goes everywhere, but the killings are not particularly graphic. The budget went on actors willing to get naked, it seems, and allowed no room for visible wounds, so all we end up with is fake blood smeared on naked bodies.I could hardly wait for this movie to be over, so I contemplated things like how the play could continue while its cast of only five people is already missing two actors, at least one of which has been discovered murdered in the theatre itself. The effort to find the killer is so lax that detectives allow the other cast and director into the crime scene so that they can watch from the seats as they go about their job of questioning one of the actors, and then disappear from the movie permanently so that subsequent performances can happen, minus the actor who got killed. Presumably the public has heard about the murder. Why are they so keen to enter the theatre where someone was brutally murdered yesterday and no one knows who did it?This is the kind of movie where people take a long time to die from POV shots so that we can see them scream, get slashed up, run away, get chased, continue to get slashed up... but then other characters die immediately from one stab if they happen to be in a crowded place so that no one around can tell they've been killed. It's as though the filmmakers realise no one who watches such a movie will care enough to notice such inconsistencies and unrealities. Or perhaps they think the audience isn't bright enough to get it.The existence of such a movie, therefore, is an insult to anyone who has to sit through it, on top of everything else.
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