A soon to be archetypal scrawny bearded serial killer with a hygiene problem (Norman Yemm) uses his shack somewhere in the Australian bush to do what all scrawny bearded people with hygiene problems like to do: chasing a young woman (Carla Hoogeveen) around until he can feed her to his pet rats. You don't want to know what he does with the remains.
Night of Fear was supposed to be the first episode of the first Australian TV horror show, but the network and/or the censor weren't all too keen on something very much in the spirit that would later produce films like (beloved in my household) Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the film was never broadcast until it finally appeared on a DVD together with writer/director Terry Bourke's Inn of the Damned (which I'll probably comment on one of these days).
The film hasn't much depth, but breathes the relentlessness and pessimism typical of 70s backwoods horror. Bourke's direction is extremely assured in its use of oppressive camera angles and suggestive editing. It seems as if the film is permanently on the look-out for ways to evoke a feeling of claustrophobia, mostly to excellent effect. It's quite a beautiful piece of short, sharp, punchy cinema, even transcending its gimmicky "no dialogue" set-up that works nicely during the main part of the movie, but is problematic during its beginning and end.
Night of Fear only really falters when the viewer starts to think too much about what she sees. It just isn't the kind of film that goes is interested in your brains at all, it instead is very much going for your jugular, with all the good and bad things this usually entails.
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