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 Actors are rehearsing a new musical about a killer and a different killer
escapes from the looney bin that is nearby. The director locks his cast in the
soundstage over night and the crazy guy is locked in as well. He goes "berserk
for the blood of actors" and this results in an "unforgettable evening of
shock, suspense, and unstoppable carnage." They claim that director Michele
Soavi has a "reputation as the leader of Italian horror's new generation of
filmmakers." They don't bother to note that he hasn't made a horror film in
almost ten years. 1987, 92 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
Michele Soavi, who so adequately essayed the role of the crossdressing killer
in Lamberto Bava's giallo botch, 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. Soavi is of course well
known for Dellamorte Dellamore and in spite of that decent effort, he's never done anything else worth
talking about (come on, you don't really want me to talk about The Church and ah, zzzzzzzzz, oh sorry I get narcoleptic attacks just thinking about The Church). Since I liked Dellamorte Dellamore, I was hoping to like Stage Fright as well, but once I got a gander at the mid-eighties haircuts perched on the
ugly cast's skulls like those Davy Crockett caps, I knew that Mike wasn't going
to be breaking any new ground in the style department. That left the story,
which
is usually a bad thing for any slasher movie to depend on. Oh sure, you've got
your gore to look forward to and you get a few pretty messy scenes, but
couldn't you get that from any number of movies with better haircuts? The
story
suffers from that retardation that seems to afflict most Italian movies of this
sort, as if all these Italian guys were on thalidomide or something when they
were concocting their latest excuse to roll fake heads down the hallway. 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!"  Most of you are probably wondering why Mike Soavi would turn down the chance to
play a psycho who runs around in black tights with an owl head on after he so
aptly filled out that dress and wig in A Blade In The Dark. I can't readily
address that question, but I can tell the two of you out there who are
scratching their lice-ridden heads, wondering what in the devil is a guy doing
running
around killing people while dressed up as some type of owl-minotaur. See, it's
really quite simple when you break it down. There's these Italian dopes who
are working on a big musical about a guy dressed up in an owl mask that likes
to kill women. Life begins to imitate art as you might have guessed from
seeing the other sixty-two Italian slasher movies with this same plot (see also Massacre and to some extent Soavi's own A Blade In The Dark romp) 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 (After all, they
would probably want the show to go on, too.). 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 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 preggers by one of the actors. And there's a skank who doesn't like the
actress who hurt her ankle. There's also a token black guy who plays the
janitor. He has a cat named Lucifer who is also black, but that's probably
just a coincidence. I've probably left out some of the lesser lights in this
production, but considering what we know about the others, who cares, right?
Girl with bad ankle comes back to the building that houses the play 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 all murdered and stuff. The cops
and press are notified and the rest of the cast shows up to stare slackjawed 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 Fat 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 (Wardrobe gal would have
wanted it that way.) 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.
Then he decides that play practice 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 broad. I think this was to make sure that the killer
didn't
accidentally escape and end the movie way earlier than Soavi had intended. 
Even though she was pink slipped, Fat Ankle is also locked in with everyone
and complains to the director about this, but he's too busy directing a big
death scene that involves Irving Wallace (the fake Irving Wallace, not the real
Irving Wallace) strangling one of the actresses. The fake Irving Wallace does
this and then he pulls out a knife and the director says something classic
like, "Jesus, what's with the knife?" Fake Irving Wallace stabs this chick on
stage in front of everyone thus revealing himself to be the real Irving Wallace
who was actually playing the part of the guy who was supposed to be playing the
fake Irving Wallace. Irving kills her and disappears (he was much scarier
before he became known as Irving, don't you think?) prompting everyone to
gather around and demand to know where the key was hidden by the girl who had
just gotten stabbed. They don't get that info out of her, so they decide it
would probably be smartest to split up with some of them staying in one of the
dressing rooms and some others going to the janitor's place to get a skeleton
key. Somehow, one of the guys gets killed when Irving takes a drill and drills
through a door right through this guy. It was all pretty dumb since there was
no reason for this guy to be standing around the door trying to prevent Irving
from getting in (it was locked) and in fact, it remains locked until the
director comes back from the janitor's room (without any key of course). The
next big plan is to stick together (in coaching we call that "making
adjustments" ) this time and head off to some other part of the
building for no reason. Irving kills some more people and this is highlighted
by the big "ripping the pregnant woman in half scene" that most of you probably
fast forwarded to without even having to be told to do so. Her beau gets upset
by this
and jumps down into the hole in the floor where his girlfriend's better half
(hehehe) was still laying and confronts Irving, who for some reason insists on
wearing that stupid owl head for the duration of the film. The boyfriend gets
a chainsaw to his chest for his trouble. Later Irving kills off everyone else
except for Fat Ankle, who had been unconscious since being pushed off a ladder
by one of the other actresses (some pretty intense backstage politics I'd say).
The remainder of the movie involves Fat 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 this guy on fire. Just to make sure that we
get the
point that Soavi doesn't really have any imagination at all, he even has this
stupid woman return later to the scene of the crime so she can find her lost
watch (I'm guessing that Soavi couldn't think of a lamer reason to get her back
there) and she quickly figures out that the police didn't recover all the
bodies they should have (One is missing! Guess who?). All this provides an
opportunity for the janitor to reappear and shoot Irving "right between the
eyes" as the janitor mutters over and over like a mantra to ward off the
prospect of any more improbable Irving revivals. 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 well-spent
twenty bucks, 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
into a building with a group of actors who just happen to have a costume with a
big mask lying around. I like the fact that even thought 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? I don't think we even need to rehash the reality
of "accidentally" going to a mental hospital to get your ankle iced down, do
we? Those of you looking for some type of tell tale sign that Soavi was
capable of making a stylish chiller like Dellamorte Dellamore in this movie can just move right along. This is just another cruddy, stupid
"bodycount" movie where people exist solely to be killed. I
don't even think you could justify labelling this one a giallo since there's no
mystery involved here and not even any psychobabble or trick endings to elevate
this above regular old post-Friday the 13th slasher status. Recommended only for folks who want to see a guy in tights
and a giant owl mask someplace other than in their dreams.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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