I saw this years ago on VHS as a kid and didn't think it was too bad. Maybe this is just too dated for me now or I remembered it differently but the version I saw recently was a special edition with extra footage and in high definition and I couldn't be any more unimpressed. A deranged psycho and mass murderer manages to escape from an asylum by killing a member of staff and makes his way towards a actors studio. That right there is the first plot hole with this, if this guy is so deranged and psychotic, why would he only be serviced by one unarmed, wafer thin orderly and be able to make his way out before the alarm is raised? Several actors who are putting on a stage play about a mass murderer are required to stay late and work on various scenes and they are not able to leave until the director is satisfied. So at the directors request, the studio is locked up and the key is hidden. The recently escaped psycho manages to get locked in with them.From then on it's just a stock standard stalk and slash fare where the killer has typically anticipated every move and manages to be in every place the victims are, even though he's never been there before and is deranged. He never makes a mistake, a whole group of people never manage to gain the upper hand and the local police are all bungling idiots. I'm cringing watching these people stumble from one stupid death scene to the next. In savage irony one of the first who gets killed is also the one who was responsible for hiding the key. Despite all the gory death scenes I was simply bored to death in this. Plus it takes far too long for it to get going. With all of the bickering and bitching going on whilst on and off the set, I'm actually wishing for all these academy award hopefuls to die horribly, so when they do, it's no great loss.There are a few moments in this of genuine tension but they just didn't redeem the movie enough to drag this into a realm of interest.I guess for fans of eighties horror this would be a must see and a must own but for someone with just idle curiosity, borrow it or rent it only.

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.

Michele Soavi's directorial debut is about what you'd expect: a psycho killer targets a group of people in a theater. As often happens with Euro-horror, "Deliria" has multiple titles in English ("Stage Fright" and "StageFright: Aquarius"). There's no shortage of gory scenes. Basically, it's what everyone hopes to see in a giallo movie.However, one scene really stuck out. The surviving woman is looking for a weapon. While rummaging through a drawer she brushes aside an issue of Time magazine. The cover story is about how excessive lending will cause debt. Well, we all saw what resulted from lending money to people who weren't creditworthy in the early 2000s. The US and Europe remain stuck with high unemployment and practically no politicians seem to have any ambition to do anything to mitigate the problem.OK, so that's not really related to the movie. I just like to see if I can say anything extra about the movie. It's a pretty fun flick. Interestingly, Mickey Knox (the cop) also appeared in "The Godfather Part III". Oliver Stone named Woody Harrelson's character in "Natural Born Killers" after him.

We have all seen Stagefright before; it's a predictable typical slasher with an unconvincing killer and young pretty people being axed off though this hasn't been done by Michele Soavi. The most noteworthy elements of the film are the camera-work, cinematography, score and it's violent, brutal deaths which are ranked by horror fanatics as some of the most vicious kills in the slasher sub-genre. It isn't a movie to be taken seriously and a massive 1980's cheese-fest which is what makes it so fantastic.First off, what Stagefright fails at is classic slasher rules; drugs, sex and language which is all absent from this movie. However I don't think the Guide to Making a Slasher Handbook was Soavi's inspiration as this is, after all, a directional debut. This isn't another Friday the 13th and it isn't another Sleepaway Camp – this is a Michele Soavi movie loaded with outrageous, loopy visuals, bizarre dialogue, bad acting and savage murders. When Soavi came out to the film industry as "Argento's protégé" he really meet expectations and Stagefright along with later films such as The Church and Cemetery Man go to prove it. Yes it does not have naked bodies, the characters are not drug inducing menaces and there is a lack of foul language but so what – this is far better than a lot of other slashers that came out in the 80's because it is just so fun and we can thank Soavi's style for that.Whilst the movie is completely silly it's still entertaining, especially for the eyes. The visuals are completely wonderful with cinematography exposing colour through the lens in a flamboyant fashion, especially when all the characters in the film are wearing such eccentric clothes. The camera-work is professionally solid and stands out, the panning is soft, the stills are (not always) very still and it's the style of camera-work one would assume would come from Argento's protégé. The score is 1980's cheese but it works a wonder and it fits well in a movie such as Stagefright, it's also a hoot to listen to as you watch a woman being torn in half from the waist down.I will not spoil the deaths in this review. There are some really nasty eye opening kills in this movie which are illogical, nonsensical and completely derivative but that's Italian Horror for you, and as a matter of fact – that's the movies for you. If someone is into violent slashers then this is perhaps the film you've been looking for though the movie isn't overflowing with gore and eye cringing kills which can be a letdown for gore fanatics.Stagefright is typically predictable like one would find in any slasher, but it offers something quite unique – it's artistic cinematic elements are fantastic, the music is a thrill ride to listen to, it's easy to watch, the characters are all wearing eccentric 80's fashion like you'd expect from a metropolis stage performer in that era and its environment is at least not a camp, beach, cemetery, small town, or anything you've seen one hundred times before in a film which requires the protagonist to take of their clothes. Stagefright is another run of the mill slasher, but it is Michele Soavi's run of the mill slasher and that is what makes it unique. It's cheese but it isn't like this movie is taking itself serious, so sit back and enjoy this reminder of what Italian slashers were like in the 1980's.