There was a moment two minutes into this movie, when a slasher like scene turned into a Cats-like play, that my mind was blown. And there was a moment halfway through where a body was torn in two that I jumped off my couch, screaming, "Soavi, I love you!"There's no other way to say it — this movie is completely crazy. Is it because of Michael Soavi's (The Sect, Cemetery Man) direction? Or the script from George Eastman (better known Nikos Karamanlis from Antropophagus and, well, kinda sorta Nikos in Absurd, a movie so brutal that it inspired a murderous black metal band)? Why ask questions? Why not just sit back and enjoy the mayhem?The entire movie takes place in a theater, where actors and a crew are creating a musical about the Night Owl, a mass murderer. Alicia (Barbara Cupisti, The Church, Cemetery Man) sprains her ankle, so she and Betty sneak out to a mental hospital to get some help. While there, they see Irving Wallace, a former actor who went on a murder spree, which has continued in the insane asylum. He uses a syringe to kill an attendant and hides in Betty's car.Because Alicia left, the director fires her while Betty is killed with a pickaxe outside. Alicia finds the body and calls the police (one of them is Soavi, who spends an extended scene asking if he looks like James Dean), who lock them inside the theater and guard the premises. Because, you know, that's the way the police handle these things.The director is inspired — the play will now be about Irving Wallace and everyone must stay the night to rehearse, even the rehired Alicia. While rehearsing the first scene, Wallace dons the killer's owl costume and strangles, then stabs one of the other actors in front of everyone.Then, Wallace cuts the phone and starts killing one person at a time. It's at this point that this movie goes off the rails and does some rails. A power drill going through someone? Yep. Hacking someone up with an axe? Yep. A woman cut in half that sprays blood all over an entire room full of people? It's got that, too. A dude getting chainsawed until the saw runs out of gas and then getting decapitated? Oh yes.Read more at https://bandsaboutmovies.com/2017/10/16/stagefright-1987/

Firstly, "Stagefright: Aquarius" is not a giallo film. Gialli were not just Italian slashers, they were murder mysteries that owed more to Agatha Christie than Wes Craven. There is literally no mystery in this movie. The identity of the killer is never revealed and isn't even treated as a question. The movie also uses that old slasher stand-by of the inescapable location. A group of people are trapped with a masked killer and have to survive long enough to find a way out. We're not surprised when inexplicably, police park outside the place and don't even try to get in.That aside, "Stagefright: Aquarius" is certainly a superior slasher. It's made with style, and even boasts a scene of actual suspense, which is more than I can say for all other slashers. It plays by the rules, as with a killer who you keep thinking might be dead but of course really isn't, but is just a lot better made than the typical US slasher movie.

From the get-go "StageFright" is playing with expectations. Like many giallos, we open with a working girl plying her trade on the mean streets. Out of the shadows, hands emerge, pulling her back. Simon Boswell's frantic electro-jazz score begins playing. The killer, dressed in an absurd owl mask, leaps from the alleyway, rolling on the ground. Everyone begins to dance, in exaggerated fashion. The camera pulls back, revealing the city as a set, the setting as a stage. This is akin to what Mario Bava did in "Black Sabbath," revealing the artifice of the film format. If we read the rest of the opening in this light, "StageFright" shows the Italian film industry in miniature. The director is an artist, determined to push taboos. The financiers cares not at all for the director's vision, only if his investment is returned. The actresses are pushed through the meat grinder, degraded. The entire production is rushed, its première only a week away. Considering director Michele Soavi worked for years in the Italian film industry as an assistant director, he can no doubt attest personally to the stuff that goes down on a low budget set.Despite its deeply European sensibilities, "StageFright" is not a true giallo. The identity of the killer is known from the beginning while the police play a small role. Instead, the film owes more to the most American of subgenres: The slasher. With so many depended on formula, many slashers are set apart by their setting. An empty theater proves a fantastic setting for bloody slashery. The premise is right in-line with the genre: A theater trope, doing late night rehearsals, are unknowingly locked in with a brutal killer. The unstoppable killer wears a silly mask and offs everyone in brutal ways, utilizing numerous weapons. The cast is large and loosely defined. An actress is pregnant with the sound technician's child, the leading man is flamboyantly gay, the director is trying to sleep with all of his actresses. It's not really important. "StageFright" even throws in an improbable spring-loaded cat.Despite fitting in perfectly with its slasher brethren, the style of "StageFright" is undeniably Italian. Soavi's studying under Argento is hugely apparent sometimes. Soavi's camera swoops around the theater, taking a frantic first-person perspective. The camera swings from a deadly pickax, crash-zooms on raised knives, and shows red paint mingling with spilled blood. The style is A-grade. When the killer finds the work shop, shown from his perspective, blatantly recalls "Deep Red." Soavi even directly goofs on Dario, either copying or parodying the "man behind a man" reveal from "Tenebre." Boswell's score isn't exactly Goblin-esque. The mixture of hard rock and electronic tones still recalls earlier Italian genre films, frequently powering the action.The film blatantly links horror with opera, mixing murder and dance choreography. The kill sequences continue the Italian tradition of stylized gore. An actress is stabbed repeatedly on stage, calling the audience out on their voyeurism. A man is impaled through a door with a giant, spiraling drill-bit, gore spilling on the floor. A woman is cleaved straight in two through a floorboard, a helpless body pulled out. "StageFright" doesn't mess around. Irving Wallace gets a chainsaw. We see an arm sawed off in clear view, followed by a full-on decapitation, the head rolling across the floor. For all its stylization, "StageFright" is intensely, explicitly gory.Unlike most slashers, who space their kills out over a ninety minute run time, Irving Wallace has eliminated most of the cast by the hour mark. Practically a very gory satire for its first hour, "StageFright" takes a definite tonal shift. The final girl is left completely alone in a theater with a viscous serial killer. The film becomes a series of jitteringly intense near-encounters. Alicia cowers in a shower stall, the killer attacking another girl in the adjacent stall. Because the design of the killer's mask, you can never be sure what he's seeing. The hallways strike you as very small, very tight. The theater becomes very quiet, Alicia aware of how much noise she is making.One extended sequence in "StageFright" will always stick with me. The music drops out, the camera slowly revolving around the entire auditorium. The killer arranges his victim's bodies on stage, smearing each with feathers, tossing a mannequin head off. Irving Wallace sits down, patting the cat in his lap, head down. The key to unlock door, Alicia's way out of this nightmare, sits in the slots of the stage. She crawls under the stage, slowly trying to wiggle the key down into her arm, worried about drawling the cat and the killer's attention. I truthfully, without hyperbola, believe it to be one of the most intense sequences ever put to film. After its torturous conclusion, the scene climaxes with a phenomenal jump-scare, one that always gets me no matter how many times I see the film. The catwalk encounter that follows is great as well, powered by the rock score and making good use of an axe and extension cord, but can't compare to the edge-of-your-seat intensity of the previous scene. Even if the rest of "StageFright" wasn't so good, the film would always be great because of that moment.The final scene returns to the earliest moments meta qualities. Soavi cribs from Argento again, the protagonist remembering back to an earlier scene, searching for a clue. The killer is put down, shot in the head. However, at the last second, blood oozing from the bullet wound, he looks to the camera and smiles. It's a winking acknowledgment of the cliché of the immortal slasher killer as well as pointing out, once again, the artifice of the film format. "StageFright" is a very underrated Italian horror effort, one of the eighties best, frequently overlooked. I adore this one. "Cemetery Man' is Michele Soavi's masterpiece but "StageFright" was the film that proved he was a master.

Director Soavi, whose debut this was, is the last of the Italian maestros of Horror to arrive upon the scene – by which time Mario Bava, the greatest among them, was dead and virtually all the rest were already past their prime! For this reason, perhaps, his work has been given slightly more than its due attention: with this I mean that, while the film under review is miles ahead of what was being churned out during the last gasp of "Euro-Cult", it does not really elicit the same level of trashy fun that the Giallo subgenre was well capable of during its heyday (despite the fact that Soavi immediately showed his clout with expert use of the Steadicam throughout, not to mention a clever opening which has a suspenseful murder being revealed as merely part of the show, the relentless and loud synthesizer-based score – which places this firmly in the bland 1980s – is positively annoying)! Still, being the third of his efforts that I have watched (with THE SECT {1991} coming up), I can say that I was only really let down by THE CHURCH (1990) – while his bizarre take on the zombie subgenre CEMETERY MAN (1994) remains, by far, his most sustained outing. Anyway, the film has a gazillion alternate titles – such as BLOODY BIRD and SOUND STAGE MASSACRE but also two in Italian, namely AQUARIUS and DELIRIA; besides, having recently mentioned the 2 differing versions of THE NIGHT CHILD (1975) in my review of that picture, this one has too – with the English-language edition (the one I acquired) being the "Director's Cut", while the Italian release print was actually overseen by Soavi's prolific and versatile mentor i.e. cult figure Joe D'Amato!The movie is basically a retread of Pete Walker's average THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW (1972) – complete with a deranged actor (named Irving Wallace!) behind the killing spree; convicted, he escapes from the asylum where he was incarcerated – the far-fetched premise being that the leading lady of a theatrical troupe went to a mental hospital to treat a sprained ankle, and the maniac chose just that moment to bolt (hiding in her car throughout the journey back to the venue where rehearsals are under way)! The first (and most outrageously disposed-of) victim, in fact, is the girl's companion who was somehow delayed in joining the others and summarily receives a pick-axe blow to the mouth! Typically, the atmosphere behind-the-scenes was already tense but, with the murder, things naturally escalate to fever-pitch: besides, the ruthless director (David Brandon) even takes advantage of the morbid situation by deciding to open earlier than expected since the public would flock to see a show from which a principal participant (even if the girl was nothing more than a wardrobe assistant!) had been offed! Soon, strange happenings inside the theater make it blatantly clear that someone else is in there with the troupe: by the way, another manipulative touch by the director of the musical being staged is to have the monster (a man in an owl suit seemingly derived from the incredible opening sequence of Georges Franju's JUDEX {1963}) in the show no longer be anonymous but is christened by the name of the real serial-killer…so that the director of the movie obviously has him actually assume that role by abducting – he turns up behind the victim mimicking a celebrated scene from Dario Argento's TENEBRE (1982) – and hiding the body of the actor (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, from PHANTOM OF DEATH {1988}) playing him! The stage is thus set for a bloodbath, with the troupe at the mercy of a maniac who, even if clearly outnumbered, always has the upper hand until the extended climax: one man is found tied upside down from the ceiling; another is perforated via a door and right though his chest with a driller (surely among the Horror genre's most popular killing tools!); about four different people are chopped-up with a chainsaw (ditto) – with Brandon having one arm torn off with it and then beheaded with an axe!; Radice is copped by the members of the troupe itself when, attired just like the killer, they mistake him for their pursuer! It is left to the very same girl (she had been left for dead by an envious colleague, whose own demise the heroine later witnesses) that 'liberated' him to eventually supply the murderer's come-uppance: while he is placing all the victims on the proscenium, with himself presiding over them, she is underneath them all trying to retrieve the all-important key to the main door (a Police car stationed outside, then, is completely oblivious to the massacre, thanks also to the pouring rain!). Anyway, he goes after her, she escapes atop a scaffolding and, when he tries to climb himself, she cuts the thick wire with an axe, dropping him to the ground. However, he rises again (incidentally, the killer remains very much a cipher throughout, in the mould of Michael Myers from the "Halloween" franchise) and is engulfed in flames…but he is still not through as, when the heroine returns to the scene of the carnage, he attacks her one more time (why his body should have been left there, when all the others had been removed, is anybody's guess), only now she is saved by the timely intervention of the theatre's gun-toting black caretaker.