Nightmares
Nightmares
| 30 October 1980 (USA)
Nightmares Trailers

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.

Reviews
Sam Panico

F you are in a 1980's slasher movie and have kids, never let them see you have sex. Chances are, you are either going to die or they are going to grow up to be complete maniacs. Possibly both!Cathy (Jenny Neumann, Hell Night) is one of those kids. When she was little, she caught her mom having sex in a really weird position that didn't look plausible. And then, her mom's boyfriend was making out with her while they drove in the car. She tried to get them to stop. However, she caused her mother's death in a car crash, with a piece of glass ending up in her throat.Sixten years later and Cathy has become Helen. She's an actress in a play called Comedy of Blood, but everyone keeps getting killed with shards of glass. There's no real guesswork here - you can pretty much figure out the killer from the first few moments of the movie.All I have to recommend this movie on is that Brian May did the soundtrack and that it is also called Stagefright, but you'd be much better off watching the Soavi film of the same name. It's so much better that at the end of this movie, I kept wondering, "Why am I not watching the real Stagefright?"

... View More
jswindter01

Stage fright AKA Nightmares is truly a nightmare, altogether not enjoyable with zero redeeming qualities!I never submit a review with negative comments, rather the only reviews I've been compelled to submit were those of praise.. Today marks a change in my writing a review for Stagefright AKA Nightmares as I truly have not one iota of praise, nor even a sliver of a positive opinion about this film.I am a hard core horror movie fan, one who does not thrive on gore, with blood and guts as a necessity to illicit enjoyment.. I am someone who thoroughly appreciates the entire genre of 70's/80's B-movie horror flicks..some of them even more than all of the entire new generation of horror movies put together..This film however is purely and completely an utter waste of an hour and a half of my life that I'll never get back(and believe me I hate reading this repeated cliché in these movie reviews) but with this movie there just is no other way in how to go about accurately describing the waste of precious time from one's life that will be made should you so choose to watch this film.I beg of you don't do it.. Don't waste your time on this movie..and please, please, please whatever you do, don't make the common, yet horrible mistake of thinking this movie is the 1987 Italian horror film, "Stagefright".. It is not, and is nothing remotely similar to the fine film of Stagefright 1987 directed by the great Dario Argento's star pupil, Soavi.Run, run from this film as fast as you can..its a complete and total waste of your time...1/10

... View More
FilmFatale

We start things off with a little girl named Cathy who has some, shall we say, "issues" about sex and intimacy. One rainy night, Cathy's in the backseat of a car and the man in the front seat gets too handsy with mom so Cathy freaks out, the car crashes, and mom shoots through the windshield. If you're playing along at home, this means Cathy's intimacy issues now get wrapped up with broken glass issues. Keep that in mind.Flash forward years later to an aspiring actress named Helen. She gets cast in a new play where she meets a cute costar, a jerk of a director, and lots of even worse people. I didn't get that it was a secret that Cathy grew up to be Helen, but just in case it was supposed to be a secret, Helen is Cathy. And then people start to die by getting stabbed by broken glass. It's very easy to figure out the killer and then there's a "surprise" ending and then we're done.Stage Fright aka Nightmares is listed as an early Ozsploitation slasher but it's really more like a late-period giallo, albeit one without any real mystery to it. The violence is pretty tame but the nudity is pretty graphic. It's not scary or even particularly interesting other than as a historical document if you're a slasher fan.

... View More
capkronos

Jenny Neumann (from the sexploitation flick MISTRESS OF THE APES, the American slasher HELL NIGHT and others) is Helen Selleck, an American actress who gets a lead role in an Australian stage production. She's a virgin because as a little girl she saw her mom having sex and then accidentally caused the car accident that killed her. Meanwhile, a black-gloved killer prowls around the theater slashing up people with shards of glass.***MAJOR SPOILER***The killer is obviously Helen (she speaks in her dead mother's voice, washes blood off her hands after the murders and is seen killing a child molester with a broken bottle as a little girl!), but this has gratuitous heavy-breathing POV camera-work and conceals the identity of the murderer until the very end like it's supposed to be some big surprise.The entire cast seems obsessed with talking about, having or trying to have sex, and, in one case, even blackmailing their way into getting laid. There's quite a bit of nudity and blood, but there's no sense of continuity, the photography is murky and the editing (by Colin Eggleston, who also scripted and produced) is terrible. The theater setting for a slasher film predates Soavi's film of the same name and Argento's OPERA (both of which are better than this one ) by five years though, and Neumann is pretty hot.

... View More