The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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.

According to the writings of several of my respectable fellow reviewers around here, "Night of Fear" was the very first Australian horror/exploitation movie ever made. This bit of trivia also got confirmed in the brilliant documentary "Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation", so I just had to see it sooner or later… Well, the first Aussie horror flick definitely is a peculiar one. "Night of Fear" is very rudimentary, both in terms of plotting and execution, as if writer/director Terry Bourke was reading in his Horror for Dummies manual whilst operating the camera. There are no dialogs, only female screams and a lot of panting, no attempts to provide depth or background to the characters and the plot is simplistic as can be. Following a banal car accident, a sole young girl ends up on a rural backwoods road and quickly finds herself confronted with a hillbilly waving around an ax. She flees and seeks shelter in a nearby cabin, but obviously her troubles only get worse in there. It may all come across as formulaic and amateurish, but "Night of Fear" actually works quite effectively! The pacing is moderately fast and the suspense is non-stop throughout the short running time. Yup, a modest and straightforward little genre outing with some nasty images and authentic shocks. Sometimes that's all it takes to satisfy a horror fanatic. The ending is very shocking and immediately explains why Terry Bourke struggled against so much controversy when it came out. "Night of Fear" was supposed to be the kick-off installment of an Aussie horror TV-series, but the idiot censors didn't agree.

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