Narrowly missing a collision with a truck, a young woman (Carla Hoogeveen) veers off the road and down a dirt track, her car ending up stuck in a ditch. Soon after, she finds herself menaced by a leering lunatic (Norman Yemm) with a gimpy leg and a rat on his shoulder.Although considered quite the shocker when it first came out, being banned by the Australian Censorship Board, Night of Fear is a very rudimentary 'woman in peril' horror - woman crashes car in countryside, woman encounters killer hillbilly, woman flees with maniac in pursuit - which will hold very few surprises and deliver scant scares for seasoned fans of the genre.I guess a few similarities to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from the following year will make it of interest to some - animal parts and stuffed rats adorn the killer's shack, and the man himself likes to play with the bloody skull of a previous victim - but on the whole, this is a mildly interesting Antipodean obscurity (the complete lack of dialogue certainly marks it as unusual) rather than an essential piece of Ozploitation.4.5 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for Pinkie the rat.

A young woman is riding her horse in the forest but is left to walk when her horse bolts. She is then stalked and taken prisoner by a maniac. Some time later another young woman is forced off the road while driving. Her car is damaged and immobile and the maniac is now after her...Reasonably interesting and intriguing, though a bit lacking. This is really a short film with pretensions of being a feature film. Only 50 or so minutes long and some scenes feel padded. A tighter script with more plot development and this would have been great.

This is a fairly tedious little would-be shocker, filled with creative camera angles that only really serve to obscure what is going on on- screen, and surprises you can see coming a mile away. It generates no tension, but does feature creative set design.It features a girl terrorized by a crazed, limping hermit who she encounters after running off the road. His Texas Chainsaw Massacre- style abode is filled with the usual things you find in serial killer's houses in the movies, like disembodied doll heads, animal skulls and newspaper clippings about crimes on the walls that I guess we are supposed to assume the owner perpetrated. The thing is that this guy doesn't exactly live in the backwoods. The girl found him after running off a main road, so why haven't the police?I feel like giving credit for an ending I wasn't expecting, though if that's due to creativity on the filmmaker's part, or improbability on the part of the plot, I'm not entirely sure. Wouldn't being gnawed on by rats wake a person up after a dizzy spell? And wouldn't it take a lot more to kill a person?This did get there before Texas Chainsaw, and I wonder if Tobe Hooper saw it. He certainly improved on the formula.

Just when you're thinking of the worst movies you've ever seen, along comes this grade Z clunker zooming into the frame! Anyone who is aware of this Aussie film will know that it was banned by the censors for a long time. It's a pity, in many ways, that the censors eventually relented, as depriving viewers of catching up with this dross would have been something of a bonus. In reality, it has very little in its favour. Okay, it may well be the first Australian horror movie, and a pre-runner of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it doesn't take very long to become monotonous and downright irritating. The actors couldn't have been too concerned about learning their lines, as there simply arn't any. It's probably the horror equivalent of "The Plank"!! Put simply, this is a total waste of time.