The Friday Night Horror Movie(s): Amityville II: The Possession (1982) & Amityvlle 3-D (1983)

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The Amityville Horror (1979) is one of those movies that I want to like more than I actually do. It has a good cast – James Brolin looking all masculine in his flannel shirts and beard, Margot Kidder is just lovely and Rod Steiger is doing his best Max Von Sydow in The Exorcist (1973) impression. I like the idea of haunted house movies and this has the coolest looking haunted house ever. But ultimately I find the film to be a bit of a slog. It isn’t scary, or eerie. It isn’t even very moody.

When watching a horror movie from the 1940s I have no problem overlooking hoary old special effects like objects moving across a room or curtains billowing without wind. But in modern movies (and yes I’m counting 1979 as a modern movie as it premiered in my lifetime and feels much more modern than say something like The Uninvited (1944) or House on Haunted Hill (1959)) similar effects just seem silly. The Amityville Horror employs a lot of silly effects that just aren’t scary or all that interesting.

Still, every few years I find myself drawn to it. Like I said I love the idea of it.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been watching a lot more horror films than I used to. This is mostly due to my creating this concept of the Friday Night Horror Movie. If I have to watch a horror movie (or more than often, two or three horror movies) every Friday then I’m going to naturally watch a lot of horror movies. One of the things I’ve been doing is watching a lot of horror sequels. It is a genre that naturally produces a lot of sequels and I’m finding it quite fun to watch them all in order. I’ve now seen all of the Friday the 13th films, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the entire Halloween franchise, and more.

This now brings us to The first two Amityville Horror sequels (there are technically a whole lot of sequels to The Amityville Horror because you cannot copyright the name of the town so anyone who wants to can throw Amityville in their name and tie it to the franchise. But the first two sequels are official and I watched them today.

But first, let’s briefly recap the original film. A newly married couple (played by Brolin and Kidder) along with their children move into a big, historical old house on Long Island. Quickly strange things begin to occur that can’t be naturally explained. By the film’s end, it is clear something has possessed the house and is trying to kill them. That something is the evil spirit that caused Ronald DeFeo, Jr. to kill his entire family with a rifle just one year prior.

Amityville II: The Possession is sort-of the story of what caused Ronald Jr to commit those murders. I say sort-of because in this film the family is called the Montelli’s and the murders happen in a slightly different manner than we see them occur in the first film.

But where The Amityville Horror was filled with classic haunted house tropes and was all the more dull for it, Amityville II just absolutely goes for it. There is no slow build-up, and no time to develop characters, it just takes off and hardly slows down to catch its breath. It begins once again with a new family moving into the house. But right off the bat, we realize this family is already messed up. The father (Burt Young) is abusive. He yells at the kids constantly and threatens to beat them, he actually does beat the wife and it is implied he forces himself on her. The kids are moody and angry.

On their first night they experience a mysterious banging on the door and a freaky drawing appears on the two small children’s bedroom wall. Soon enough the oldest boy (Jack Magner) becomes possessed. He starts hearing voices telling him to kill his family, he yells at his mom and seduces his sister.

It gets weirder from there. If the original played it safe then the sequel throws off the rails and just goes for it. Most of the script, especially the dialogue, is pretty bad, but I love that all of the actors and the direction just completely go all out.

Amityville 3-D (1983) is much more reserved, but I kind of liked it more than the other two. It is a for-real sequel in that it takes place after the events of the other films. By this point the house is famous, or maybe I should say notorious. It has set vacant for years because no one in their right mind would buy it.

Naturally, our film’s hero does just that. He is John Baxter (Tony Roberts) a journalist working for a magazine that specializes in debunking supernatural con artists. He and his coworker Melanie (Candy Clark) debunk a pair of hoaxsters working out the Amityville House and afterward, John decides to buy the place (he’s getting a divorce and it is being sold dirt cheap).

You know the story by now, weird stuff starts happening. What I like about this film is that John comes to the house knowing its history and he doesn’t care. He’s a skeptic. Because of this, the film rolls out its supernatural stuff very slowly. Some of the mysteries and even a couple of deaths happen outside of the house. For sure, supernatural events and gorey deaths happen, but it takes its time with them. The film is more the mood piece the original wanted to be, but here it is quite successful at it.

It was directed by Richard Fleischer who made great films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Compulsion (1959), and my favorite Soylent Green (1973). This is a man who knows how to direct a film, not the usual hacks that wind up directing the third film in a horror franchise.

As the title implies it was originally shot in 3-D. While there are the usual effects you find in that type of film (various objects flying at the screen, long objects being turned slowly toward the camera) Fleisher and his cinematographer Fred Schuler make the best of the format. Their use of depth of field is masterful. There is almost something in the foreground – a lamp, a tree, anything – that gives the characters or other objects in the screen depth. Shots indoors often take place in a place that allows you to see down a hall or into other rooms. Characters move in and out of frame, etc. It must have been really something to have seen in 3-D, but even in 2-D it looks really cool.

The rest of the filmmaking is very good as well. The actors are quite good and I found the entire thing a pleasure to watch.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Taste of Fear (1961)

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On Friday nights me and the family usually go upstairs to my room and watch Doctor Who. Afterward, the wife and daughter remain in our room to watch Youtube videos, while I go downstairs and watch a horror movie. Tonight, the daughter is staying over at a friend’s house. Which leaves me and the wife here alone.

Friends, I have to admit I didn’t know what to do with myself. We were too tired and poor to really go out for a date night. It is too hot outside to go to the park or anything. So, we had a little dinner and watched a movie. Two movies, actually.

Because I am a creature of habit I could only watch a horror movie tonight. That’s just what I do on Friday nights. Also, I write this article and I couldn’t let you all down, could I? I know every single one of my readers waits for me to tell them what horror movie I watch on Friday nights. 🙂

But my wife doesn’t like horror movies. So, I had to find something she could enjoy as well. Enter Hammer Studios. They made a whole lot of horror movies in the 1960s and 1970s that are not too scary, or gore-filled but are also a lot of fun. My wife can enjoy that sort of thing, and actually quite likes Hammer Horror as a genre.

The first film we watched was Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) which is the third film in Hammer’s Dracula series and the second to star Christopher Lee as the vampire (the second film The Brides of Dracula (1960) doesn’t actually have Dracula in it at all). It wasn’t great and since we decided to watch another film after that one, and it is actually quite good, I’ve decided to talk about it instead.

Taste of Fear (sometimes called Scream of Fear) is a wonderful bit of gothic psychological horror. It stars Susan Strasberg as Penny Appleby a wheelchair-bound heiress who has been away from home for ten years. When her father summons her she returns to his estate on the French Riviera. Strangely, when she arrives she finds that her father has just left on business. Stranger still, that night she sees a light on in the no longer used summer cottage attached to the estate. Upon investigating she finds the corpse of her father sitting in a chair.

Fleeing, she accidentally falls into the pool and knocks herself unconscious. When she awakes she is assured by everyone that it was all just a hallucination caused by fatigue and too much wine. As an avid moviegoer, I know at this point she’s being gaslit, but the reasons why are unclear.

The film has a lot of fun (very slowly) unveiling those reasons. Penny continues to see and hear things that make her believe her father is at the house, but no one will believe her. Well, almost no one. The chauffeur (Ronald Lewis) eventually does and becomes the love interest. The film gives us so many twists and turns that it is hard to know what is real and what isn’t. Just when I thought I knew what was happening the film mixed things up and I was completely surprised.

It is a bit of a slow burn, it takes its time to get interesting, but it is beautifully shot in black and white and is filled to the brim with atmosphere and mood. Once things do take off it becomes really quite wonderful.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bloody Hell (2020)

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After accidentally killing a woman while trying to thwart a bank robbery, Rex (Ben O’Toole) is sentenced to eight years in prison. Upon release, he decides to go to Finland to escape the media circus (the trial made him famous) and start a new life.

At the airport, he is noticed by a strange couple who keep staring at him and talking about him in Finish. In Finland, just arriving at the airport, he takes a cab. The driver puts releases some gas into the back cabin knocking Rex out. He awakes to find himself tied up in the basement of the strange couple’s house, with one of his legs cut off.

To tell much more of the plot would be to spoil much of the film’s fun. And it is a fun film, despite all the horror, dismemberment, killing, and gore. Rex talks to himself and this is displayed by having him literally talk to himself, as in the actor plays a more sarcastic version of Rex which we literally see as two people. That allows for a lot of humorous back and forth, which works better than it should.

The family consists of a mother and father, and twin sons who are all murderous psychopaths. But there is also Alia (Meg Foster) who understands how screwed up her family is but has not been able to escape. Naturally, she becomes a love interest of sorts.

For the most part, the film deftly mixes its thriller/horror moments with some pretty funny comedy and a surprising amount of whimsy. When Alia first talks to Rex and realizes he might be her salvation we whip into a fantasy sequence with her dancing with Rex in a beautiful field while romantic music plays. That sequence will get a hilarious replay towards the end of the film with some imaginative changes.

It doesn’t always work. The back and forth between Rex and his imagination can be a little grating at times. The family drifts a little too far into cartoonishness, especially at the end. But I found it quite enjoyable. Horror comedy is difficult to pull off and Bloody Hell does it better than most.

The Friday Night Horror Movies: 12 Feet Deep (2017)

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Two estranged sisters, Bree (Nora-Jane Noone) and Jonna (Alexandra Park) go swimming at an indoor public pool. Before the official closing time the crotchety pool manager (Tobin Bell) yes to everyone to leave. They are closing for the holiday weekend and he wants to have an early start on it.

As they are leaving Bree realizes she’s lost her engagement ring. Jonna finds it at the bottom of the pool, stuck in a grate at the bottom of the pool. They both dive in to retrieve it. At the same time, the manager engages the pool cover and locks it up. The girls are stuck inside the pool for the long weekend.

That’s a pretty interesting premise for a film. The trouble is there is only so much tension you can ring out of two girls in a pool. The cover keeps them trapped but there is plenty of air and while a few days stuck there would be difficult it likely isn’t deadly. So it has to find new or different things to keep the viewer interested.

The film initially tries to do that by upping the emotional conflict between the two girls. Jonna is a drug addict, three months clean, who has just returned from rehab. Bree has a burn scar on her arm from a childhood trauma that slowly gets revealed as the film goes on.

But that really isn’t enough to keep an audience interested, especially when you want to bill your film as a thriller/horror. It also isn’t that well done. The writing for these scenes just isn’t strong enough.

The film seems to understand this, having the girls at one point joke that all they need to make it a perfect night would be for sharks to enter the pool. Honestly, I think I would have preferred some sharks.

Eventually, we learn that Bree is diabetic and she needs an insulin shot or she’s going to go into a coma. That creates a little tension, but it still isn’t enough.

Enter Clara (Diane Farr) an ex-con who was working for the pool, but just before the girls got trapped we were treated to a scene where she was caught stealing from the lost and found and got fired for it. She sees the situation as something that could be advantageous for her.

She steals Bree’s phone and what little cash she had in her purse. Then demands the PIN for her bank card. Then this, then that. She’s just awful and becomes the film’s Big Bad.

But the film keeps going back to the sisters talking. Bearing their souls. Getting down to the bottom of their dark past. Then when that gets boring Clara will come back to do something terrible.

The movie isn’t bad enough to be outright awful. It is adequately directed – Matt Eskandari gets good use out of the pool’s geography and the two leads are good enough for the material. But it also isn’t very good. It is a film that is trying just a little too hard to be deep and emotional but it never quite connects in that fashion. Then it undercuts itself by having Clara do something completely over-the-top or allowing Bree to slip into unconsciousness.

It also isn’t very scary or horrific. It is labeled as horror which is why I watched it and why I’m writing this piece, but it just barely skates into that territory.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)

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Ginger Snaps (2000) is a wonderful coming-of-age horror film about two angst-filled, sarcastic teenagers who form a death pact before one of them gets bitten by a werewolf and begins to change.

Its sequel finds one of the girls, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) stuck in a rehab clinic after she overdoses on the wolfsbane she’s been injecting to keep her own transformation at bay.

At the clinic, she meets Tyler (Eric Johnson) who trades whatever the girls are addicted to for sexual favors, and Ghost (Tatiana Maslany) a young ward of the clinic who quickly realizes that Brigitte is a werewolf and becomes her only friend.

The film loses a lot of what made the original so great – mainly the bond between the two sisters and their withering takes on suburban life in high school. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) does appear in the film, but only as a hallucination and she’s more foreboding than fun). Ghost doesn’t provide nearly the same punch.

Yet, it is still an enjoyable film. It relies more on the drama of whether or not Brigitte will escape the clinic and stop her full transformation into a werewolf than horror tropes. Though there is a werewolf stalking her, looking for a mate.

The first film used the werewolf transformation as a commentary on puberty, this film critiques the ways in which men tend to prey on young women.

When the horror does come it is appropriately violent, and gory. Overall it isn’t quite as great as the first one, but it’s still carries quite a bite.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Special Effects (1984)

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There is a question that, I suppose, needs to be asked here. What, exactly, is a horror movie? Sometimes that’s easy to define. Horror movies have ghosts or monsters in them. Vampires, blobs, werewolves and other creatures of the night fill the screen of many a horror film. But what about more pedestrian horror? Movies in which the villain is human.

Jason Vorhees is just a man in a hockey mask with a machete (at least in the early films, he later becomes superhuman and virtually unkillable). But there are lots of crime movies with higher body counts. No one would argue that the Friday the 13th movies are anything other than horror, but serial killer movies are often called thrillers.

Maybe that’s because there usually isn’t a police detective trying to solve the case of the Jason killings. But then there are a lot of Italian horror films, giallos especially, that plotwise are basically police procedurals.

Maybe horror movies are more gore-filled. But that doesn’t always track either because some cop flicks concentrate on the extreme violence of their killers. And plenty of horror films have very little gore or none at all.

I don’t have an answer here. It is a big debate that I won’t solve in these pages. I mention it because tonight’s Friday Night Horror movie could be considered more of a thriller than a horror, but it does carry the horror genre label on IMDB and that’s what I thought it was coming into it, so that’s what we’re gonna keep calling it.

Andrea Wilcox (Zoë Lund) left her husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) and small child in Texas to go to New York City and pursue an acting career. Though she’s willing to sleep with producers and directors and anybody who will give her a part she’s only able to find jobs doing nude modeling and the like.

When Keefe comes to get her back and bring her home she lies and says that her career is starting to take off. Why, she has a meeting that evening with Neville (Eric Bogosian) a famous movie director. She does in fact go to his house that evening and literally begs him to at least take a look at her.

He does look at her, then sleeps with her, and secretly films the encounter, and strangles her to death. He cleans her up, puts her inside Keef’s car, and dumps it at Coney Island.

The cops immediately suspect Keef and arrest him. Neville hires an expensive attorney and gets him free on bail. He then decides to make a movie about Keef and Andrea. He gets Keef to play himself and finds an amazing Andrea look-alike in a woman named Elaine (also played by Zoë Lund) to play Andrea.

Things get weird from there.

B-movie auteur Larry Cohen mixes Vertigo (1958) with Body Double (1984) and bits of Peeping Tom (1960) into a sleazy cauldron of awesome. He has Brian DePalma’s flair for taking Hitchcockian ideas and amping up the sex and violence, but very little of either director’s sense of style. Though he does create some really interesting sets, especially Neville’s giant apartment filled with mirrors and water.

The film really is more thriller than horror as Neville takes his movie ideas to extremes and is more than willing to kill again to maintain his cinematic goals.

Special Effects wasn’t at all what I was expecting when I put it on, but I found it to be quite enjoyable.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

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I love going into a movie completely blind. Not knowing anything about a film before watching it can lead to beautiful surprises. It can also lead to utter befuddlement and disappointment.

The only thing I knew about The Pope’s Exorcist before watching it tonight was that it starred Russell Crowe. Well, I knew it was a horror movie, and I was pretty sure it was going to involve some exorcism, but that’s it.

Honestly, I kind of thought it was going to be about the Pope getting demon-possessed and Russel Crowe was going to save him. I didn’t really think about the details of how that might work – how the head of the Catholic Church could get possessed – but it sounded kind of cool. It still does.

But no, the title refers to the fact that Russel Crowe’s priest – Father Gabriele Amorth, who was a real person – was hired directly by the Pope and would, in fact, be his personal exorcist were he to be possessed. But that doesn’t happen here. Instead, a demon possesses a little boy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney).

Though Amorth was a real person and he was the official exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, the actual story is completely made up. Although one could easily argue it was mostly stolen from The Exorcist (1973). The boy does all the things demon-possessed kids do in these types of movies. He curses, he blasphemes, he sexualizes his mother, turns crosses upside down, etc.

There is also a mom (Alex Essoe) and an older sister (Laurel Marsden) and a tragic backstory (the dad was killed in a car accident, the boy saw it happen). But all of that is very bland and the film doesn’t really care about any of it.

Russel Crow plays Amorth like a jokester who carries a lot of pain. His performance reminded me of his character in The Nice Guys (2016). He periodically, though not often enough, lays down these great little sly jokes. I wish they’d leaned into that aspect a lot more. I rally wish I’d watched The Nice Guys again, that movie is terrific. Mostly this film is a very serious slog.

They don’t do anything new with the possession angle, but do spend a lot of time having Amorth and his newfound buddy Priest Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) dig up the church’s sins (the Spanish Inquisition and the child abuse scandals) and blaming them on the devil.

It all concludes in a big sloppy, CGI mess that is as incoherent as it is dumb.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Psycho III (1986)

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In 1987 there was a made-for-TV movie called Bates Motel (it has nothing to do with the more recent TV series of the same name except for the location and existence inside the Psycho Cinematic Universe). I was 11 when it came out, which seems young to be watching a Psycho movie, but it aired on NBC so it must have been deemed safe to watch by my parents.

I don’t remember anything about it except that I loved it, and that it briefly made me obsessed with all things Psycho. I’d never seen the original Hitchcock film or any of its sequels, but I certainly knew about them as they were part of the cultural zeitgeist. Sometime later Psycho III came on some basic cable channel late on a Friday or Saturday night. I don’t think I started it from the beginning but found it while flipping channels and stayed.

I don’t remember anything about it either, and in fact, didn’t realize it was Psycho III until tonight while watching it. What I do remember is a scene in which a pretty young thing does a sexy dance in a motel room while a young Jeff Fahey watches on. He’s naked while sitting in a chair holding a lamp in each hand, wielding one like a sword, or rather like a giant, misshapen cock.

It was about that time when my mother, who must have been watching the film in her bedroom, called out that I should turn the channel. I guess I wasn’t deemed old enough to be watching that one.

I’m not entirely sure why I decided to watch Psycho III tonight, all these years later except that I recently was surprised by how good Psycho II is, and thought maybe this one might surprise me as well.

It isn’t exactly bad, but it is exactly what one might expect from the third sequel in a 1980s horror franchise. It is darker and sleazier than the previous films but unlike Psycho II it has no interest in really empathizing with Norman Bates (though Anthony Perkins’ performance is still quite sympathetic).

The plot picks up soon after the events of the last film. Norman is still running the Bates Motel, and the corpse of Emma Spool has been preserved and speaks to Norman as his mother. Fahey plays a skeezy drifter who takes a job at the hotel.

The film opens with a woman screaming “There is No God” and then it fades in to Maureen (Diana Scarwid), a nun shouting that line again” while staring up at an icon of the Virgin Mary. She then tries to kill herself by throwing herself off the top of a bell tower, in a scene that resembles a similar moment in Vertigo.

The film was directed by Anthony Perkins and he fills the screen with references to the original film and other Hitchcock movies.

Maureen is kicked out of the convent and finds herself staying at the Bates Motel. She and Norman hit it off while Fahey generally acts like a dick. There’s also a journalist who thinks Norman may still be killing people, or at least probably killed Emma Spool.

Meanwhile, Norman is still killing people. Mostly pretty girls who turn him on. Mother doesn’t like that, you know?

There is no depth to the film, it doesn’t attempt to make Norman’s killings a mystery. It is very much a 1980s horror film with some pretty good kills, some really great lighting, and quite a bit of sex and nudity. As such it is pretty good. As the second sequel to one of the all-time great horror films (and the regular sequel to a pretty darn good horror film in its own right), it is disappointing.

I can’t decide if I want to watch Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), but I definitely want to track down Bates Hotel now.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987)

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‘Salem’s Lot was one of the first Stephen King novels I ever read. It remains one of my favorites. Tobe Hooper made a pretty good TV mini-series out of it in 1979. Apparently, Larry Cohen had originally been slotted to adapt the book, but the executives hated his screenplay and gave Hooper the job instead.

Years later Warner Brothers approached Cohen to direct a low-budget horror film for them and he pitched the idea of a sequel. Interestingly, the sequel was intended as a theatrical film and in fact, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and saw a limited American release. But the reviews were terrible and the box office a dud and so it pretty quickly went straight to the VHS shelves.

Outside of a few gorey effects, a couple of naked breasts, and a lot of children swearing, the film feels very much like a made-for-TV movie. The budget was clearly small, the acting amateurish, and it is edited within an inch of its life.

It follows Joe Webber (Michael Moriarty), an anthropologist who is called away from studying a native tribe in the South American jungle to take care of his young, troubled son Jeremy (Ricky Addison). He takes him to a run-down house he’s inherited in the small New England town of Jerusalem’s Lot (or Salem’s Lot as it is sometimes called).

Pretty quickly he realizes the town’s inhabitants are either vampires or their human slaves. Actually, they pretty much straight-up tell them who they are because they want him to write a book about them. To convince him to do this they kidnap the boy and get a young vampire girl to sweet-talk him into becoming a vampire as well.

Joe figures this is a good time to hook up with his childhood sweetheart and do a little remodeling of his old homestead. Seriously, the film makes some really odd choices.

Soon enough a Van Helsing-like vampire hunter shows up (played by director Samuel Fuller in a rare acting role) and eventually our heroes get to some actual vampire slaying.

A Return to Salem’s Lot feels like it should have been a mini-series. There are a lot of ideas floating around in it, but few of them get explored. A lot of scenes feel like they were cut short, as if maybe a lot of footage was shot but due to time constraints they had to be cut. Or maybe they just didn’t have the budget to shoot everything in the script.

As it is it feels very disjointed, and unrealized. There are some interesting ideas. The original story is basically ‘what if Dracula showed up in a small American town’ and this one takes that concept and has the vampires take over the entire town. Yet here they are also a persecuted minority. They fled Europe with the Pilgrims for the safety of the new world. They are good Americans. They don’t even kill humans (well, most of the time) but breed cows for their blood needs – and it is quite a scene watching some elderly actors pretend to suck the blood out of cows lying in a pasture.

All of this creates some light satire of American consumer culture, but again it is pretty disjointed and cut to shreds.

Despite all of this I still rather enjoyed it. Cohen knows his way around a low-budget picture and he gives it enough oomph to make it not terrible. Fuller is having a blast playing the crotchety old hunter.

Not a great movie by any means, but a fun one to watch.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Stage Fright (1987)

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I did work study for the theater department for most of my years at college. I had an amazing time. For each show, we’d spend weeks in rehearsals working several hours every night and building the sets on the weekends. Then we’d put the show on for three weekends in a row. It was a small theater department so we often had folks from outside the school performing and working. It was much more like community theater than your typical university theater.

Everybody working a show from the actors to the director and the stagehands became a small family for a few months. And because it was a community theater often the same people would come back and work the next show, and the next. I made some great, lifelong friends at that theater.

Because of this, I love a movie about theater life. Stage Fright is a pretty terrific slasher film from director Michele Soavi that takes place almost entirely in a theater.

A small theater troupe is rehearsing a show about a serial killer who wears a big owl head while he attacks young women on the city street. It is set to open in just a few days, but the maniacal director Peter (David Brandon) doesn’t think it is ready. He locks all the doors, hides the key, and demands everybody stay all night to perfect the show.

Two actresses, Alicia (Barbara Capisti) and Betty (Ulrike Schwerk) find a way to sneak out because Alicia has sprang her ankle and needs medical attention. The closest doctor is at a psych hospital and naturally, a psycho-killer escapes while they are there and sneaks into their car.

You can guess what happens next. It takes a while for the bodies to start piling up. There is some enjoyable behind-the-scenes at the theater stuff. Some of it is on point, but some of it seems completely ludicrous. All of the cast is hungry, they need the job, they need the money, and they desire the fame. When the first girl dies the police are called and the press shows up. The director immediately tries to use it as a means of drumming up publicity.

But three days before opening night, he also fires one of his lead actresses, rewrites entire scenes, and makes big changes no director in his right mind would do that close to opening.

Not that any of this matters. This is a slasher film, not a theatrical documentary, but this nerd noticed.

Soavi has a great eye. In some ways the film is more Giallo than your typical slasher, which makes sense since he studied under Dario Argento. There is a great visual sense throughout the film, but especially in the last act. There is a scene in which the stage has been set in a most theatrically macabre way and then a fan clicks on and blows feathers all over and it is so strangely beautiful.

The killer wears that giant owl head for the entirety of the film and it is just terrifying. Once the kills do begin they come fast and furious. About halfway through I was mentally writing this review and I thought to myself that there wasn’t much gore for a slasher film. I was oh-so-wrong. Not long after that things get very bloody. The kills are good as the kids say.

The best slashers are typically no more than dumb fun. Stagefright is that, but it has more style, more of that special something that elevates far above most films in the genre. It comes highly recommended by me. Perhaps even more so if you’ve ever done any theater.