Nicole Kidman as a feisty
teenage ninja. Admit it. That’s something
you’ve always dreamed of seeing. And see it you can, in this confusing
Australian sci-fi thriller about a rogue martial arts teacher who tries
to kill his star pupil.
Kidman plays Amy, just one of a gang of high school kids who while away
their free-time in The Game, a sort of paintball-infused assault course
where the acrobatic youngsters dress all in black and sneak around an
abandoned power station. Get tagged by an opponent and you’re out.
First to ring the bell dangling precariously at the top of the derelict
building is the winner.
The current champion of The Game is Robby, an earnest and decent sort
of a lad, who is falling dangerously under the influence of Steve Beck,
his alarmingly deranged karate teacher and an ex-soldier who spouts survival
of the fittest clichés whenever possible. This is a source of
concern for Miss Spane, apparently the school’s only other teacher
who confusingly takes classes about Shakespeare in a science lab. She
used to date Beck and has now developed a rather dubious Oedipal relationship
with Robby.
The big secret is that Beck is addicted to performance enhancing drugs,
supplied by the school’s resident bully who delights in winding
our young hero up. It all goes horribly wrong when the final of the local
martial arts championship takes place on the same night as the final
match of The Game. Denied the drugs that will guarantee him victory, Beck
kills his dealer with a swift chop to the nose. Robby witnesses the murder
and, foolishly, admits as much to Beck when they inevitably
face off in the final round. Beck then mercilessly pummels Robby and,
when the match is abandoned following the discovery of the dealer’s
body, he stalks Robby to the remote location of The Game and tries to
bump him off in this not-exactly-safe environment.
A mostly incoherent film, Nightmaster is stuffed full of terrible Eighties
synth music (including numerous agonising scenes in a bar where a low-rent
Oz version of The Pet Shop Boys seem to play a never-ending set) and
other trappings of the era that taste forgot.
The movie also contains vague hints that the story takes place in some
Orwellian dystopia of the future. Robby receives a message from his mother
on what can only described as a prototype DVD player, ominous loudspeakers
announce the start of a national curfew, and the school tannoy refers
to the students by number, and demands they report to the “Control
Room”. Yet apart from these fleeting and unexplained futuristic
flourishes, everything else looks and acts exactly like an episode of
a late Eighties Australian soap opera.
Flitting in and out of this story, Kidman’s Amy is both Robby’s
main rival in The Game, and also his budding love interest. With her
chubby, rosy cheeks and enormous mass of curly red hair, she’s
a far cry from the chiselled ice maiden we know today, and also a rather
unlikely candidate for ninja success. For one thing, there’s no
way she could contain that unruly mop under the regulation ninja hood.
It’s also worth noting that we never once see her performing anything
that might pass as martial arts, something that you’d think would
somewhat hamper her aspirations, but no. The movie ends with Amy and
Robby in the throes of love, and the revelation that Amy is now champion
of The Game and a fully-fledged ginger ninja.
Need to know: Nightmaster was originally released under the title Watch
The Shadows Dance, a title that makes even less sense. Miss Spane was
played by Joanne Samuel, best known for her role as Mel Gibson’s
doomed wife in Mad Max. The rest of the cast, like so many Australian
movies of this period, went on to appear in a whole host of soap operas
such as Sons & Daughters, The Flying Doctors and The Sullivans.
