Rating: 
Summary: REHEARSALS CAN BE MURDER
Review: STAGEFRIGHT is the debut of acclaimed director Michele Soavi. Soavi does some brilliant camera work and maintains a claustrophoic aura of suspense in the locked up theatre. Also, the rain in this movie is some of the eeriest and atmospheric in some time.
The musical which the actors are staging also has to be one of the strangest sequences in a horror film. Use of an owl as the killer is also strangely horrifying. While the plot is standard and at times predictable, Soavi's flair for the garish yet subdued carries the movie far above many of the copycat American slashers of the 80s. The cast is pretty disposable, although Barbara Capisti as Alicia is a beautiful victim, and David Brandon's Peter is hysterically nasty.
A movie with a lot of style, gore, and unusual camera angles, STAGEFRIGHT is one of the better Italian Eurohorror flicks.
Rating: 
Summary: Better Than American Slasher Flicks!
Review: Thas right folks, I owned this movie back in the day. As a matter of fact I walked into Rogers video and beleive it or not, they had this movie with a price tag on it that said free! But that explains everything. This movie was the biggest piece of crap ever. I felt ripped off when I got it for free.
Rating:
Summary: HALL -OWL- WEEN
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: 3.5 stars. Beware the Murder-Bird
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty darn suspenseful
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty darn suspenseful
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Shocking thriller from the director of Cemetery Man...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Better Than American Slasher Flicks!
Review: This movie has it all it's super scary!, stylish direction, dark atmosphere, great camera work, gratuitous violence and gore, a creepy soundtrack and a memorable shower scene. Director Micheal Soavi is miles above and beyond Dario Argento he can actually create suspense and scare an audience, something Argento has't done in dozens of films. American Horror films seldom deliver like this one does. Bravo to Soavi's brilliant debut film.
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