VHS Review: Stage Fright (1987)

By Brian
3/5

Stage Fright is a horror film about a troupe of actors who face a world of trouble when one of them accidentally takes a deranged psychopath back to her theater.  What stands out the most in this movie is how the psychopath wears a creepy giant owl mask the whole time, never talking or revealing his face. The murders in Stage Fright are brutal, yet not original.  The killer uses your usual power drill, chainsaw, knife, etc. to kill his victims; some solid murders being a chainsaw bifurcation and an axe-to-mouth (yeah, I really wanted to write that.)   Personally, my favorite murder was when the psycho kills a chick on stage, right in front of all the other actors, who merely look on thinking it's part of the "intellectual musical" they are performing.  Other than that, the movie was almost entirely made of horror movie cliches, including: bad omen cat, raining really hard the ENTIRE time, oblivious cops, "Killer-Vision", super 80's soundtrack, and of course, the one chick who ACTUALLY manages to fend off the killer for longer than two seconds.  While these cliches don't necessarily take away from the film, they don't add and extra bonus points either.  The boob action in Stage Fright is also weak, only a couple pairs and shot from weird angles.  This movie lost another point for a crappy ending, which lasted way too long and didn't make a lot of sense. For being a solid, yet a little too cliche horror film, Stage Fright gets an admirable 3 oblivious cops parked right outside out of 5.

Why is it always raining in horror movies but never windy?