Entry 89: StageFright (1987)

StageFright (1987)

Dir: Michele Soavi

"The theatre of death."
 

When Alicia (Barbara Cupisti, New York Ripper, Opera), lead actress in an "intellectual, new wave musical" (read: pretentious, off-Broadway claptrap which includes a man dancing around in an owl mask), injures her ankle, she seeks medical treatment at the nearest available facility, which, of course, happens to be a mental institute housing insane actor Irving Wallace.  Wallace follows Alicia back to her theatre, dons the aforementioned owl mask and begins stalking and killing off her co-stars and her tyrannical director (David Brandon, Emperor Caligula: the Untold Story, The motherfucking Blade Master!).  That's about all the plot you need to know.

I enjoyed the hell out of this stylish, MTV-inspired late-entry giallo from the director of The Church and the cult hit Cemetery Man.  It begins with an effectively grotesque murder that is revealed to be a fictitious sequence in Alicia's play and ends with a baroque setpiece involving staged corpses, flying feathers, hissing cats and rickety theatre scaffolding.  While the script relies on hoary cliches (the actors are forced to stay in the theatre even after the killer is revealed due to either injury or desperate need of a paycheck; the cops assigned to the scene after the first murder is reported suffer car trouble), Soavi (who had acted for Fulci and served as an ADA for Argento and made his directorial debut here) keeps the pace fast enough, and expertly fills the picture with enough well-handled genre requisites (cacophonous rock score, neon colors, masked killer, murder set pieces) that the film is over before you really notice.  Speaking of murders, the effects are great, and highlights include a pick axe through the eye, drill through the stomach and a man bisected via chainsaw (illuminated by flashlight in a particularly effective sequence).  Genre vet Giovanni Radice (AKA John Morghen, Cannibal Ferox, City of the Living Dead) is a hoot in an against-type role as a bitchy gay dancer.  I can't recommend this enough to genre fans; it's stylish, artistically-mounted and FAR more entertaining than films produced by mainstays Fulci and Argento during the same period.  I need to show this one to Mrs. Basement of Sleaze; she LOVES owls!  As the stage director in this film is fond of saying "the show must go on," I'll leave you with this gem:

   

Fucking.  A.