Stage Fright (1987)/Old Review

 

As part of an Italian horror triple feature for Saturday evening, I decided on Soavi's Stage Fright (1987) to follow Argento's Deep Red (1975). I've been wanting to revisit Stage Fright for some time.

IMDb user comments from May 2007:

A stage production comes under siege of a serial killing actor(notorious for shopping up 16 different victims to pieces with an axe)named Irving Wallace who has escaped the holding cell of a psychiatric hospital. After a stagehand is killed with a pickax, the director quietly decides to continue his stage production out of desperation for his sagging career and a good payday. He informs actress Corinne(Loredana Parrella)to lock the exit/entrance door and hide the key. Of course, she's the next female victim to be killed, viciously stabbed by Wallace, who hides under the hawk head of actor Brett(Giovanni Lombardo Radice, really playing his prototypical homosexual prankster to the hilt in scene-stealing fashion). So the crew who decided to stay on and continue the play are trapped in the building! If that isn't inspired, I don't know what is. The rest of the film has the crew trying to stay close together and alive as Wallace roams the building with various weapons he confiscated from a workshop(including a drill which penetrates the stomach of one victim, a chainsaw which cuts one fellow's arm clean off and cuts two more poor helpless souls in half, and stabs another quite viciously with a blade). The female protagonist is Alicia(Barbara Cupisti), an actress fired from the leading role when she escaped from the building for a while to get her bruised ankle looked at(coincidently by a doctor at the psychiatric hospital;Wallace hid in the backseat of Alicia and her stagehand friend's car). They do remember a skeleton key being placed in an office desk drawer which might be their only means out of the building. Soon, the killer will have it and Alicia will have to use her brains to get out of the building or else.

Director Soavi himself plays one of the cops stationed outside the building in the car supposedly to guard them from further harm..he has a novel with the photo of James Dean printed on it wondering to his partner if he resembles the Hollywood legend.

Not exactly original, but a pulse-pounding gore-thriller nonetheless. Soavi was establishing himself here staying close to the genre of his predecessors. He'd later make his own path with Dellamorte Dellamore. Stagefright is very stylish with a rather silly ending that just won't quit.