Alright, buckle up. Let’s take a ride through Nightmares (aka Stage Fright), a film that makes “so-bad-it’s-good” sound like an overstatement reserved for cult classics. In truth, this one should come with a warning: “Viewing may cause irreparable respect loss for Australian cinema… and possibly for your own taste.”
Here’s the premise, if you can even call it that: little Cathy accidentally kills her mom in a car crash. Cut to sixteen years later, and she’s Helen, a psychotic actress starring in a stage play called Comedy of Blood, which is less a comedy and more an instructional video on how to be murdered by a shard of glass. Think Friday the 13th, but with fewer stunts, more bad wigs, and the moral weight of a poorly rehearsed high school production.
The killer’s motivation? About as coherent as a caffeinated squirrel. Helen is haunted, apparently, by teenage guilt—but also by theatre, because… obviously. The audience doesn’t get closure because the plot itself seems to have been murdered halfway through, decapitated, and left in a prop coffin.
Gary Sweet’s debut is legendary only in the sense that you can’t unsee it. He’s acting—or flailing—in a role that seems custom-built to make him question every life choice leading up to this film. Jenny Neumann as Helen is… well, she’s there. She screams, she broods, and she occasionally moves like someone who’s just realized she left the oven on at home.
John D. Lamond, fresh off Pacific Banana, brought the Steadicam to Australia, which is technically impressive, but you’d never guess it from the final product. Watching the camera glide over this storyless void is like watching someone run a marathon on a treadmill in a dark room—technically skilled, emotionally bankrupt. Brian May’s score is the only thing giving you a pulse, a soundtrack desperately trying to inject life into the cinematic corpse.
The supporting cast is a parade of what can only be described as “performances in danger of self-harm.” Max Phipps, Edmund Pegge, and John Michael Howson as the smarmy theatre critic Bennett Collingswood all seem to exist to remind you that subtlety in 1980s Australian horror was considered optional.
And the production backstory is the cherry on this corpse cake: Lamond basically threw this together as a tax-driven quickie, giving everyone a solid week to “pretend they were making a movie” before handing it off like a hot potato. Distributor dumped it. Critics ignored it. And yet here we are, decades later, marveling at a film that makes you appreciate every single good Australian horror film you’ve ever seen… by comparison.
In short: Nightmares is the cinematic equivalent of chewing on cardboard that’s been seasoned with bad ideas and faint traces of regret. It’s a “watch at your own risk” experiment in patience, endurance, and existential horror. And if you’re a fan of seeing what happens when talent, money, and narrative sense collide like drunken boxers in a dark alley… congratulations, you’re in for a treat.
Cast Jenny Neumann as Cathy/Helen Selleck Jennie Lamond as Young Cathy Gary Sweet as Terry Besanko Max Phipps as George D’alberg John Michael Howson as Bennett Collingwood Nina Landis as Judy Edmund Pegge as Bruce Briony Behets as Angela Production
