StageFright

Stage Fright

This Blue Underground release is a 1987 Italian slasher, and the debut film of director Michele Soavi an Argento protégé.

Stage Fright begins in the middle of a strange dress rehearsal for some exploitation stage show involving murder, sex, and a killer wearing an owl’s head as a costume. The director (the prerequisite dick who you know has to get killed painfully at some point in every one of these movies) explains his grand vision of an edgy performance where a woman is killed and then comes back to rape her own murderer.

Okay… not quite Broadway material, but I might buy a ticket…

Barbara Cupisti plays Alicia, the lead female. She manages to twist her ankle and sneaks off to the nearest hospital to get it looked at. Only it is a mental hospital… that is holding a psycho killer until his trial. Who happens to be an actor who snapped one day and brutally murdered a whole bunch of people. Of course he escapes. And, of course, he stows away in their car back to the set, beginning the setup for the murder spree.

It is a slasher film… the story is as can be expected is a bit weak, but if you’re looking for a heartwarming romance and a tale of lost childhood innocence you’re on the wrong web site. You get a lot of disposable characters, with paper-thin back-stories. You just don’t spend a lot of time developing backgrounds for people who exist for the sole purpose of inflicting large amounts of pain.

And there is pain. The kills come quick and brutal once the slaughter begins. A few up-close and personal stabbings, a decapitation, a girl getting ripped in half, some chainsaw action, and a dude being disemboweled by a power drill… nothing shocking or original at this point as far as slasher films go, but they work well.

What you do get is lots of great camera work, which is telling of the skill of the director. Despite nearly the entire film taking place inside the same studio Soavi makes fantastic use of the frame to set his scene. One is always catching brief glimpses of the killer, between props in the distance, stalking between hiding places just outside of his next victim’s view. Even one of the kills is made entirely by clever camera work. A simple, single, thrust of the knife- one of the most boring ways to kill someone- is made delicious by the camera as two girls stare wide-eyed and helpless at each other with nothing more than a shower curtain between them, neither one daring to make a sound to give the other away as the knife slowly slides in.

The costuming was a bit odd at first, with the lead killer being dressed in a simple black suit and a giant owl head. A bobble head sports team mascot hardly sounds like something that could rank up there with killers wearing a hockey mask or someone else’s skin, but seeing the guy in action it starts to give you that kill happy cheer-for-the-bad-guy feeling. And I think it works. To the point where just looking at him starts to get creepy. There is one notable scene that defines creepy, with the killer posing with the arranged corpses of the slain, sitting center-stage, like some mad king. He’s like a victorious but bored Conan sitting on his throne. (Or at least it would be if Conan wore the head of a bird and had the bodies of dead hookers scattered around him. But other than that…)

This film also does something I absolutely love to see in horror films- the victims get their shit together and actually think about fighting back. They all head down to the workshop load up on axes and crowbars and all sorts of instruments of nastiness, then go off to kick some ass. (They fail miserably, and three of them end up getting killed off in a span of about 5 minutes, but they get credit for trying.)

The pacing slows down a bit near the end, when just Alicia and the killer are left, and it unfortunately ends up relying on the clichéd “oh my god, he isn’t dead! Kill him again! Oh my god, still he isn’t dead!” closer to finish off the film. But, I do have a serious amount of respect for the classic pre-CG full-body stunt burn, from the days where if you wanted to show a man on fire on camera you wrapped the sucker in three inches of fire-retardant cloth, covered him in rubber cement, threw a match on him, and filmed him flailing around like a burning mummy. (And we liked it!)

If you ignore the retarded ending and the 80s synth soundtrack, the rest of the film was a worthwhile kill-a-thon that is just a hell of a lot fun the whole way through. For more information about this movie head over to http://www.blue-underground.com

3 of 4

reviewed by Jeremy Gaggins