An absolute waste of money

A different way of telling a story

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

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!

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.

Fearless editing and sound design from an unknown Australian filmmaker in the early 70s. Night of Fear - It's not a completely lost treasure but it does contain incredible composition, editing and brave use of sound (none being dialogue) skills throughout.It would've been a hard fight to get any distribution- not so much because of subject matter or the violence, but of the techniques used that would not have been endorsed by standard filmmaking at that time. What was more impressive is the quality of the print they had for the telecine transfer! It was almost spotless!Terry Bourke (19 April 1940 - 2002) I salute you.More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Fear_%28film%29

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.