Night of Fear

source: Night of Fear

Moviecut—Night of Fear

It's not a work of great entertainment, but it's artistically competent and well worth it for anyone who likes to dip and wallow in Horror. The editing merges a bit of the raison d'être of a movie trailer, that is, clippings of what will come next, without clarifying what will actually come - which didn't particularly work for me. But, knowing now that this is a movie crafted into a TV series, this almost stylized edit makes sense. The characters present themselves in the standards of horror films, already very well established in the 1970s, and do not develop a complete arc, they are just there to do what is expected of the genre: kill and die. What you have then is the art around it. Photography, performances and soundtrack.

Before Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and way before WOLF CREEK, was this little Aussie treasure of sheer gore and stupidity of the Z-grade kind. What I admire about this film is the lack of dialogue, so there was no Aussie twang to cringe about. The effective campy horror suspense music with the wild and sometimes abstract editing made it more engrossing. If you peel away all the zany technical aspects of the movie and look at the bare bones, you are left with the hammy performances which was perfect for this slasher. On top of that was the very thin storyline, about a woman who loses her way in the Aussie bush and comes across this mad man who plays a game of cat and mouse with her. Nothing creative in the telling of this story, but still good ole trashy slasher fun. The highlight for me was those freaky cuts to naked bodies and sacrificial sex scenes, which almost made it very close to being an experimental slasher film. Maybe if it was recut to ten minutes, then this could have been a great experimental short film of the bizarre kind!

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.

Terry Bourke's Night of Fear was originally meant to be the pilot for an Australian TV-series titled "Fright." However, the censors banned it on the grounds of "indecency and obscenity." That is unfortunate, as it would have made a great TV series, as this was a pretty good movie in its own right. Although you can tell it was a pilot, as the movie has opening titles very much like a TV show (and it is called "Fright), plus it only goes for 50 minutes and there is pretty much no dialogue. Having said this, it is grisly and unsettling and although tame by today's standards, does feature a few nasty scenes. Also (and very interestingly) this was made two years before Tobe Hooper's widely regarding cult classic, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." While I was watching this, I was constantly reminded of Hooper's film, with the outback setting, the distressed and screaming heroine and the disturbed hillbilly villain. Night of Fear is virtually plot less, it follows 'The Woman' (Carla Hoogeveen) who takes an accidental wrong turn to avoid a collision and crashed her car near 'The Man's' (Norman Yemm) house. He stalks and terrorises her for the rest of the film. It is a shame this was extended into a feature length with some dialogue, as it would make a great 70's exploitation film along the lines of Hooper's "Massacre." However, for what it is, it is quite good and it would not surprise me if some filmmakers got inspiration from this...("Wolf Creek"). 3½/5

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.

I was born in 1973 so was looking for Aussie movies from around that time, STAN is a goldmine at the moment with the COVID-19 lock-down. Amazing piece of cinematography for the era, way ahead of his time. Not a single word of dialogue throughout but was totally enthralled from the first minute to the last. Hints of Hitchcock amongst others. I am off to investigate now as I would love to know where this was filmed!

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.

I want to say that this movie is very much a product of its time, but it might actually be the influence that led other movies like it to be what they were. Many of the reviews on this site compare it to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but note that this movie came first. It follows a girl who gets stranded in the woods and is terrorized by a killer who lives in a remote shack. There is lots of trippy music and Easy Rider-like editing. There wasn't much indication that it was set in Austrailia except for a road sign, and there is no dialog. It does create a very distinct atmosphere, both in look and tone, and there are some gory images. One scene that wasn't done very convincingly was the rat attack. Fans of bad movies would enjoy the ineptitude of that sequence, but there is little else to recommend it for those with only a general interest.