Customer Reviews

Stage Fright

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the debut film of Michele Soavi, director of the classic Cemetery Man. Soavi, who worked as assistant director to Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava among others, has crafted an intense and stylish slasher about an escaped homicidal maniac stalking the cast and crew of a musical that have decided to base their play on him. With brutally gory scares and an overpowering claustrophobic atmosphere, this has some stunning sequences that outshine many of its American counterparts that came out in the 80's (especially in a scene where one of the castmembers must retrieve a key, in order to escape, from underneath the killers feet!). Look for John Morghen (Gates Of Hell, Make Them Die Slowly) in a small role. This release from Anchor Bay is a great transfer (restored from original Rome vault materials) and is totally uncut.
On a side note- Director Terry Gilliam met Soavi at the Brussels Fantasy Film Festival where Stagefright was being shown.He liked this film so much that he made Soavi a 2nd unit director on his next film-The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen.

Stage Fright is one of the scariest slasher films ever that almost matches up with Halloween and Psycho. The plot is simple:
Alicia, who is working on a play that is about a psycho killer dressed as an owl, hurts her ankle on set and then her costume lady named Betty sneaks her out of rehearsal and takes her to the nearest hospital. But it isn't just a hospital, it ends up being a mental institution! Still, the doctor there agrees to look at Alicia's ankle. Staying at that hospital is Irving Wallace, a beserk actor who took 16 people and "cut them into little pieces!". He is staying there because the court is reviewing his trial. Betty and Alicia go back to the theater when they're done, but they end up bringing Irving Wallace back with them because they forgot to lock the door to the car!
*Spoiler Warining* Soon after Alicia is fired for sneaking out by the director of the play named Peter, who needed her while she was gone. Betty goes back out to her car because she left her lights on and is then murdered by Irving Wallace (I won't say how, it's pretty creative). After the police come and take away her body, Peter tells Newspaper Journalist Mr. Ferrari that he will take Betty's murder as an advertisement and pull opening night back a week to encourage more people to come.
Peter asks 8 people in the production to stay and rehearse all night. They are actors Brett, Laurel, Cibil, Corrine, Danny, Alicia, assistant director Mark, and journalist Farrari. Peter asks Corrine to lock all the doors to the theater and hide the key so nobody will be able to get out and they will have to rehearse all night. Unfortunatly, Irving Wallace gets locked in along with them, and steals Brett's owl costume and walks around the theater with it. Soon after, Brett dissapears and during rehearsal on stage in front of everyone's eyes, Irving Wallace murders Corrine. Corrine was the only one who knew where the key was, and Irving pulled out the wires to the telephones, so they are trapped in there and they have to find the hiddent key to get out to the 2 policeman outside in a car. Irving Wallace starts murdering them one by one in gruesome fashion.
This movie is stunning. The soundtrack is great, the music loud and suspenseful. The gore level is high and the special effects are great. The cinematography is outstanding, especially during the fish tank scene and a certain scene at the end that will definatly have you on the edge of your seat.
Stage Fright is one of the best slasher films ever. Definatly comes close to Halloween and Psycho. Director Soavi is a great director for this film. This is highly recommended to horror film fans, even recammended to people who don't like horror films.

The first fiction movie of Michele Soavi is a very good surprise for the amateur of horror flicks. I mean of good horror flicks because, believe me or not, those movies exist but you must have a strong stomach and a lot of patience to discover them amidst the vast choice available. STAGE FRIGHT belongs to the peculiar sub-genre of the psycho-thriller, a genre directly inspired by Agatha Christie's AND THEN THEY WERE NONE. Take a dozen innocent victims and a madman with a mask and that's it.

From these premises on, directors reveal their peculiar skills or interests : some are, to speak frankly, would-be surgeons and like to fill the screen with gallons of blood during 90 minutes, some are more interested in the possibility to discover new ways of killing and the others seem to have accepted the job only in order to pay their taxes. Those directors are of no interest to me so I just skip them.

But Michele Soavi's STAGE FRIGHT reveals an authentic filmmaker. Locked in a theater, nine actors and a director must defend themselves against a madman who's just escaped from the local asylum. Like Jason or HALLOWEEN's Michael Myers, this madman wears a mask, the mask of an owl. And that's really innovative and scary. But completely stupid as the audience knows from the beginning of the movie on that the killer is Irving Wallace (not a spoiler), a serial killer.

So, from the moment one understands that the director's purpose is not to revolutionize the genre but rather to pay an homage to his colleagues and to the best scenes presented so far - in 1987 - , the movie stops being only a scary flick and becomes a wonderful journey through the annals of the cinema of horror. I've particularly liked the homage to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, a scene filled with a visual poesy one rarely finds in such movies.

Of course, Soavi didn't have an enormous budget to spend, certain characters don't have much to say and the actors are a little amateurish at times but who cares after all, STAGE FRIGHT delivering a subtle pleasure that blockbusters unfortunately can't give anymore nowadays.

Superb transfer from Anchor Bay, a trailer and a biography of the director as bonus pictures.

A DVD zone screaming room.

This is a cool slasher movie, though not quite as good as I'd hoped/anticipated. It's pretty stylish, and quite tense a lot of the time, but it takes a while to get going, and the stuff the occurs before the killing starts is pretty weak. Even after the killing starts things don't really take off until Cupisiti's the only one left. The killing of the other cast members is pretty good, but generally far from extraordinary. Still it's worth a look.

There ain't a whole lotta plot to this, and virtually no character development.(Let's see here, the director is a jerk, Radice is an over-the-top gay stereotype and.... well that's it. Everyone else is a faceless victim) Anyway the premise is that a killer, donning a big owl mask, gets loose at a light-night rehearsal for a musical. They become trapped in the building when the key is lost, and the only person who knows where it is has been murdered, and they then have to fight for survival. Despite the lack of plot, it takes a while to get going, as the characters pretty much just stand around and talk or complain about nothing in particular, or rehearse their fruity musical. But what can I say, the plot in a slasher movie is usually non-existant, and they're usually pretty boring until the killing starts. So none of that matters all that much.

Once the killer arrives, it doesn't take long for him to polish everyone off except the protagonist, played by Barbara Cupisiti.(And can't remember the characters name, so I'll just refer to the actress) The killings come so fast that they don't build that much suspense, but they are pretty gory. Though the fx tends to be mediocre to lousy, this movie still scores pretty well on the goremeter. We got a pick-axe through the mouth, some stabbing, some chainsawing, drill impalation, an axe decap and a chick gets ripped in half. The more effective kills, however, are actually some of the less gruesome ones. One of the best ones involves a stabbing during a rehearsal of the play. Naturally, the killer is mistaken for an actor in the play, and proceeds to stab the victim in front of everyone. It cuts between shots of the killer attacking her and close-ups of each of the witnesses faces, showing their confusion and horror. It's a very nicely done scene. Even better is a scene late in the movie, as 2 potential victims hide in a room, one of them injured, which allows the killer to find them. As he holds the injured one up against the wall, about to stab her, the victim sees Barbara across the room, hiding. They just stare at each other for a moment, horrified, before he stabs her, neither of them able to do anything to prevent it. It's a bizarrely powerful moment, and evokes a genuine sense of hopelessness.

As I said before, things really get good when Barbara and the killer are the only ones left. It's genuinely tense, and Soavi's visual style shines through, with great, steady camerawork, and a brightly colored and oddly light stage providing a surreal and eerie setting. The much famed scene of the killer hanging around on the stage with his victims is a cool as advertised. It ends with him sitting down and stroking a cat rather contentedly, with his various victims lying all about him, and a fan blowing feathers around the stage. It's truly an odd image, and it really has little to do with anything, but I think it's very cool. The following scene, as Barbara sneaks underneath the stage which contains the aforementioned nightmare image is also quite effective, and very suspenseful. Sadly, this film insists on their being some false climaxes, and, as usual, the latter climaxes tend to be worse than the earlier ones. But this doesn't detract to much, in the end, and is pretty much part of the territory.

I must mention that I rather like the killer's having an Owl head. It seemed like a bad idea to me, but I think it's actually pretty creepy in the movie. It's just such and odd thing, I dunno why it just works. Also, the score is pretty hit and miss. It's your standard Goblin rip-offf, and lots of it is just annoying, particularly the loud synth roar that they use repeatedly. Once again, the music in the latter part of the film tends to be more effective than the earlier stuff.

Yeah, I like this movie. Not great, but entertaining enough if you're into this sorta thing.

This is SO one of my favourites. It's gory as hell but it has plenty of suspense as well. The film's director, Michele Soavi, had prior to this film worked on at least two Dario Argento films so it's easy to see where he got his basic training. It's very stylish and has a memorable music score, not quite like the soundtrack you hear in most american slasher films. I'm a big fan of the slasher film genre and I won't condemn american slasher films (many of them are quite good) but these euro-horror-slasher films are really worth catching if you're a fan.

STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS
[Deliria]

(Italy - 1987)

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Theatrical soundtrack: Dolby Stereo

A group of actors become trapped in a theater with a rampaging maniac who has just escaped from the nearby psychiatric clinic...

STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS (the full on-screen title) not only marked the directorial debut of Euro-cult favorite Michele Soavi - billed here as 'Michael' Soavi - it also marked a reunion of several prominent figures from the heyday of Italian exploitation. Produced by renowned sleaze merchant Joe D'Amato (Aristide Massaccesi [BURIED ALIVE, EMANUELLE IN AMERICA]) and written by splatter stalwart George Eastman (Luigi Montefiore [RABID DOGS, ABSURD]), and co-starring John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice [CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD]), this deceptively modest shocker attempts to subvert many of the clichés associated with 'traditional' slasher movies, and does so with style and grace. Viewers weaned on a diet of bland Hollywood 'horrors' may not succumb immediately to the film's wayward plot developments (including the central device of an off-off-Broadway stage musical which celebrates the very same serial killer who winds up massacring most of the cast!), but once the basic premise has been established, the narrative assumes a near-demonic life of its own.

Beginning with a frankly horrific sequence in which the masked killer is mistaken for an actor during rehearsals and encouraged to 'kill' a female co-star (only to commit the bloody deed for real!), Soavi's direction is razor-sharp and visually appealing. The murders are outlandish and gruesome, though also tragic in places (watch out for a shower sequence which operates both as a suspense set-piece and as a vivid demonstration of human cruelty), and Eastman's clever screenplay strips the characters down to their emotional core, revealing a gamut of fears and prejudices which leave many of them vulnerable to the killer's predations. The climactic sequence - in which a frightened young actress must retrieve an all-important key from its hiding place within inches of the killer's feet - is ghastly, beautiful and terrifying, all at the same time.

Outside of these major set-pieces, Soavi's relative inexperience is betrayed by a couple of ragged camera movements and some odd editing choices, while the performances are compromised by flat post-sync dubbing. But overall, the movie is a triumph, one which plays Soavi's mentor Dario Argento at his own game and largely succeeds.

Michele Soavi is a very stylish director, and rightfully so - he's a protege of Dario Argento, director of horror classics like Suspiria. Stage Fright is his directorial debut and he gives us a fine example of a stylish Italian horror film.

The story is the standard slasher plotline: a group of people are trapped in a building with a maniacal killer who has escaped from a mental institution. Sounds familiar... In this case, the group of people is a bunch of stage actors rehearsing some sort of avant-garde stageplay and the building is a theater. Even though we've all seen this kind of thing before, Soavi manages to keep it fairly fresh and interesting. If you're familiar with Soavi's other films, this is definitely his most grounded and realistic film. If not, check out The Church and Cemetery Man.

The cast is decent, but no one stands out. The most colorful character is Peter, the play's director. He's an unlikable jerk and you just can't wait to see him get what's coming to him. All the other actors are pretty bland and forgettable, even the main character of Alicia. The killer, named Irving Wallace, is the best character because of the mask he wears. All the classic slashers have their trademark masks: Jason, Michael, Leatherface, etc. and they're all nifty and scary. Wallace wears a giant owl mask. Yep, you read it correctly; a giant owl mask! As stupid as this sounds, it's actually quite creepy because the mask has piercing yellow eyes. Coupled with the killer's movements, it makes for a pretty menacing image. I also found the caretaker to be a memorable character, despite him only being in the film for about 15 minutes.

The gore and special effects are well-done. Though it does take a while to happen, once people start dying, it gets quite gruesome. You've got a pick-axe in the mouth, drill through the abdomen, chainsaw severing someone in half and slicing off an arm, a hatchet decapitation, and a bloody headshot. The blood effects are decent, but nothing too over the top.

My main problem was that the movie takes too long to get moving. It's at least half an hour before the film gets into its groove, however once it gets going around the 40 minute mark, it is definitely worth watching! It becomes fast-paced and suspenseful, with the above-mentioned death scenes to satisfy any slasher fan. Another slight annoyance was the fact that the theater had two metal doors, both of which became locked so no one could escape. I'm fine with this; if the characters could just run away then there's no movie. However, in the film we are shown that there's a workshop full of power tools that could've been used to escape! C'mon, a chainsaw is quite capable of cutting through a metal door! But that's a minor nitpick because, as I said, no trapped people means no movie.

The film has some great shots, showing that Soavi had already honed his filmmaking skills as an assistant director on other films. The shots from the point of the killer early on remind me of The Evil Dead and some of the camera angles and overhead shots were interesting. My favorite scene, by far, has to be the part near the end where the killer collects all the dead bodies and displays them onstage and "decorates" them with feathers, which fly and flutter all over the stage, providing a very cool-looking and surreal setting.

From a DVD standpoint, both Anchor Bay and Blue Underground have released this film and as far as I know, the two releases are identical. I own the Anchor Bay version (now out of print) and at times the quality can be a little lacking, but that's expected with older horror films. The Blue Underground version may have a better quality transfer since it was released more recently, plus it's not out of print. Either version is worth buying.

All in all, not Soavi's best film but it's worth checking out if you're a fan of slashers and horror movies in general.

This film has some very nice and gory death scenes, it was directed by Michele Soavi and it was his first film you can tell that Soavi is a protoge of Dario Argento and has learned alot from him. He creats a lot of suspense and has done a fairly good job with this film as it was nicely done and has some very stylish shots, however the music sounds very cheesy which was typical 80's synth pop that was reminicsent of the American slasher films that were released during the same period but you'll notice that the film itself looks different from those other films of course, the film is more like a slasher/horror than a giallo cause we already know who the killer is. The film takes place in an old obsolete theatre where a performance group are rehearsing for their new play 'The Horror Musical' a drama inspired by the real events connected to a sadistic mass murderer named Irving Wallace. They are unaware that Irving has escaped from an asylum and is heading their way, the killer wears a huge owl mask to conceal his identity and also uses everything he could get his hands on from a huge drill to a chainsaw and a knife so you get to see alot of hacked off bodies and lots of blood and gore which I thought was fantastic. The acting wasn't that good and some of them were just O.K. but then again why the hell would anyone watch this type of film for the acting?. This is the only film that I have seen from this director but I am looking forward to seeing his other films like The church and Cemetery man which has been re-released on DVD by Anchor Bay, overall this was a very good Italian horror film which I highly recommend to Italian horror fans...

Having seen many of Soavi's later works fully restored on DVD, I felt obtaining Stage Fright would be something fruitful. Personally, I'm glad I picked it up, too, because the quality of this release made my formerly viewed copy blatantly outdated. Along with the gore aspects of this film that could now be witnessed, ( including the creative use of a power drill as a door knob, a chainsaw during a little tug-of-war, and, of course, the trusty axe)there were other, more subtle atmospheric qualities, now apparent, and these propelled the movie that much more. This, coupled with the fact that you really don't know who is or isn't going to die next, makes the guessing game fun while the killer plays tag. Its a safe bet.

this movie was pretty damn fun to watch.
i love 80's slasher movies and this was a good buy for me.
so,if you want a nice bloody slasher flick from the 80's,buy it.