By Geno McGahee
In the 1980s, masked killers were everywhere. Every killer found a reason to wear a mask and they were usually an elaborate disguise. Very few wore the ski mask. They opted for something interesting. They were more than killers. They had style. In the 1987 slasher “STAGE FRIGHT,” the killer wears an owl mask. It’s one of the coolest masks I’ve seen in slasher films. You have to have respect for the killer. That mask was so heavy that he had to sweat his ass off, but it was more important to look cool and he looked very cool.
When you watch this film, you can easily tell what decade it’s from. It’s painfully the eighties. The style, the music and everything else tells us that this was a slasher flick from the 1980s, and I loved it. I love when I stumble across a slasher flick from this time that I haven’t seen before.
Now we have a group of actors participating in a play about a killer in an owl head. The director is struggling to make it, the money-man that is investing is desperate, and the actors and actresses are all hoping that this will be their big break, but it’s not going well. The show just isn’t clicking, but when a serial killer escapes a local hospital and takes out a stagehand, the director gets the great idea to revamp the script and make the play about this killer.
The actor that was wearing the owl mask is taken out and now the killer is wearing the costume and is on a killing spree. Everyone is locked inside of the building and the owl-head killer is taking them out in elaborate ways. The killer does have style in both wardrobe and his kills, using all sorts of instruments to take out his victim. At one point, he has a chainsaw. Seeing a guy in an owl mask wielding a chainsaw is awesome and when he chops off an arm with it and then beheads the same guy with an axe. It makes you want to cheer. What a great job and what a great looking film this is. This is an Italian film and it screams it. It has that great look that Italian horror films do and it adds to this great film.
STAGE FRIGHT is a really good 1980’s slasher film with a unique killer and great style. The only complaint that I have is the ending. When you have a killer in a mask, you expect a whodunit. I was waiting for the escaped killer to show up dead somewhere and one of the characters that we’ve come to know to come out as the real killer, but it was as advertised. The killer was the killer and he just opted to wear the owl mask for some reason. Well, it was cool, but this could have been a great whodunit had more thought gone into it. Despite that fact, this movie is awesome and I highly recommend it.
Rating: 8/10
