Michele Soavi, who so adequately essayed the role of the crossdressing killer in Lamberto Bava’s A Blade In The Dark, decides that if you want things done wrong, you should just go ahead and do them yourself in this, his first effort as a director.
How else to explain a movie where an owl-headed killer wipes out the entire cast save one in the first hour of the movie? After he chainsawed and axed the second to last guy and there was a half hour to go, I was shouting at the killer, “pace yourself! You’re going to need something for the big finish, bird brain!”
It begins simply enough about the putting on of a musical about a guy dressed up in an owl mask who likes to kill women. Life begins to imitate art after a wardrobe woman and one of the actresses take a quick trip to the nearby mental institution to get the actress’s ankle taped up.
Sometimes I wish that guys like Soavi would have people in his life that cared about him and would tell him when he was doing something stupid. Somebody (preferably not named Argento or Bava) that he could bounce ideas off of. Someone that could point out how incomprehensibly dumb it is to have his characters look up a hospital in the yellow pages, go there, find out its an asylum, and decide that since shrinks are doctors, they wouldn’t mind working on the occasional ankle.
If all of that weren’t goofy enough, this nut hut just happens to be the same place where the notorious actor/serial killer Irving Wallace is staying as a guest. Guess whose cell they have to walk by on their way to get somebody’s ankle fixed? Guess who breaks out and hides in somebody’s car? Guess what asylum has such slack security that no one notices a guy escaping to a car that is parked right outside the front door?
The cannon fodder, I mean cast of the musical is a varied lot that can be summed up in about a sentence each. There’s the prick director (David Brandon of Beyond Kilimanjaro) who wants to put the show on at all costs and thinks it would really be quite the artistic statement to have the woman who was killed by Owl Head rape him later in the show. (I think this one has the Tonys locked up, don’t you?)
There’s the portly business guy in the cheap suit who is putting up the money for the show, but is most interested in hitting on the actresses. There’s the effeminate guy playing Owl Head. There’s the actress who hurts her ankle. There’s an actress who is pregnant by one of the actors. And there’s a skank who doesn’t like the actress who hurt her ankle.
The girl with the bad ankle comes back to the theater and finds out that she’s just been fired for going AWOL to the hospital. She leaves in a huff and finds the body of the wardrobe gal.
The cops and press are notified and the rest of the cast shows up to stare slack jawed at the body in the parking lot. Irving Wallace has escaped and it doesn’t take long for someone to lay the blame on old Swollen Ankle for bringing the killer back in her car.
The director immediately senses an opportunity to cash in on this murder and orders some script changes and you immediately wish that Michele Soavi would have done the same. The director changes the name of the killer from something we never knew to Irving Wallace and decides that they will open in three days instead of the next week so that they can take advantage of the recent killing and its attendant publicity.
He also decides that rehearsals will continue and that just to be on the safe side, he should lock everyone in the building and have the only key hidden by some woman. I think this was to make sure that the killer didn’t accidentally escape and end the movie way earlier than Soavi had intended.
Once most of the cast has been disposed of, the remainder of the movie involves Swollen Ankle trying to get this key and fending off Irving. She does a pretty fair job of dishing out the punishment to this guy, shooting him with a fire extinguisher, dumping him off a catwalk, hacking through a cable he climbs back up and sending him plummeting to the stage below, and then finally setting him on fire.
The only thing this particular slasher film has over any of the myriad other slasher dog brownies that litter the front lawn of home video is that some of the killings are pretty graphic (chick ripped in half, guy chainsawed, arm hacked off, head lopped off – that sort of thing), so if that’s your criteria for a solid flick, have at it.
For the rest of us, it’s just a very thin effort. The killer’s motivation is recited in about a sentence or two by someone early on. Some vague babble about an actor who went crazy. Wow, that’s great – what a lucky break that he managed to escape the crazyhouse and get himself locked in a building with a group of actors who just happen to have a costume with a big mask lying around.
Aside from that fortuitous coincidence, not much else made sense about the killer or his actions. Even though this guy could break out of an asylum, he couldn’t escape a building where a crabby director had merely hidden the house keys? Why didn’t he kill more people at the asylum? Why didn’t he take the car he was in and just drive away? Why did he ever go into this building in the first place?
This is just another cruddy, stupid body count movie where people exist solely to be killed. You can’t even justify labeling this one a giallo since there’s no mystery involved and not even any psychobabble or trick endings to elevate this above regular old post-Friday the 13th slasher status.
© 2010 MonsterHunter
