A generic title like Stage Fright may not be enticing to anyone browsing Prime listings for some off-the-wall curio to watch on a Sunday night. But consider that the Italian release title was the entirely appropriate Deliria (the film has also been known as Bloody Bird, which at least suits the plot, and Aquarius, which doesn’t). The directorial debut of Italian director Michael Soavi, who may be better known for the Rupert Everett vehicle Cemetery Man, this Grand Guignol spectacle is filtered through the kind of ‘80s excess as could only be imagined by a disciple of Dario Argento.
The movie draws you in immediately with the sound of a cat mewling under the opening credits, which open to a panning close-up of a woman’s lace-stockinged legs. This is Alicia (Barbara Cupisti, who would go on to be Soavi regular), a pretty actress reduced to wearing a shocking white Phyllis Diller frightwig in an unusual stage production called The Night Owl.
Director Peter (David Brandon) is trying to make sense out of his original script, which features a part for a Marilyn Monroe-dressed blonde playing a saxophone while a male dancer wearing an owl head pretend to assault the lead actress on stage. “Stop!” the director insists, clarifying to Alicia, “A whore—you’re supposed to be a whore!”
Stage Fright is already over the top, ridiculous and thoroughly compelling, and that’s just the beginning. The action takes place almost entirely in the confines of a theater, with the conflict coming when Alicia dares to escape the creative cage to have a doctor look at her sprained ankle. Unfortunately, the nearest doctor is at the psych ward, where mass murderer Irving Wallace, a thwarted actor himself, happens to escape and hitch a fateful ride that turns the Night Owl rehearsals into a bloody birdbath indeed.
Soavi cut his soundstage teeth acting in cheap Italian rip-offs of American films with titles like Alien 2 and City of the Living Dead. But as second assistant director on Dario Argento’s Tenebrae, he began to find his calling, and though Soavi has asserted he wasn’t ready to direct Stage Fright, he makes it his own despite the copious movie references. And boy are they copious: aside from the brief Seven Year Itch nod at the beginning, Soavi peppers his soundstage with layers and layers of homage; the extended final set piece includes sequences that seem to refer to several films at once: there’s the Judex animal head throughout, peppered with bold visual references to Citizen Kane, The Trial, Peeping Tom and even Zero de Conduite, with the film’s massacre floating with feathers in a scene that suggests an innocent pillow fight gone horribly wrong.
Don’t let the screenwriting credit to George Eastman fool you—that’s a pseudonym for Genoa native Luigi Montefiori. But the script, co-written by Sheila Goldberg (a dialogue coach on Argento’s loopy coming-of-age thriller Phenomena) is an almost non-stop hoot, and if the screenwriter chose a nom de plume that paid homage to one of the pioneers of film stock, Stage Fright revels in cinema, from Renato Tafuri’s intensely saturated cinematography to Simon Boswell’s bombastic score. And the actors for the most part play the campy proceedings straight, which makes the surreal touches all the more effective.
At any moment in Stage Fright, you can see Soavi’s predecessors onscreen: after all, most of the plot takes place on a rainy night right out of Suspiria. But Soavi brings his own unstoppable flair to this delirious slasher, and his incongruous flourishes are amusing; to take just one example, how many directors would have a nurse at its pivotal psych ward not only take time to feed a spiky tropical fish, but insert a vivid close up of the nurse making fish faces at the creature as it flashes its deadly-looking gills at the camera? Stage Fright may be the most thrilling thriller ever to suffer such a dull title.
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