K-SCORE: 8
Writer / Director: Jerome Sable
Starring: Allie MacDonald, Minnie Driver, Meat Loaf
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“The problem was the execution.”
You know a movie is bad when you feel like your first instinct after the credits roll is to defend why you even tried to watch the thing in the first place. Look, there was potential in the premise. I promise! Sure, it was a risk, but it wasn’t a guaranteed flop. Look at Zombeavers. A slasher can have a low budget, not take itself seriously, and still be really good. What if Stage Fright was Zombeavers the musical? Did I just blow your mind? Well, irregardless, it’s not. It’s terrible.
Stage Fright follows a girl who is not afflicted with stage fright in the classic sense, but occasionally has the reasonable fear of being murdered by men with butcher’s knives attacking her. You see? It’s a double entendre. Because the film is set in an academy for the development of the theatrical arts and and musical enhancement of youths. But then they die. Allie MacDonald plays Camilla, a blossoming young thespian / camp line cook who must overcome a great deal. First she must contend with prejudices of the other campers who look down on her because she’s the camp’s resident attractive, talented, good-hearted, hard-working, failure. Then, because of the sexism of the director, she must balance her desire to thrive in the camp’s production with her desire to not behave precisely as a prostitute does only with less of a reward. Then, she has to fight, literally, backstage, with a man who might be her brother and a man who might be her father, who may or may not have killed her mother in the same camp in a situation creepily similar to her own where the stakes are life and death… and the attention of a pretentious musical theater critic. If you don’t think that sound great then we’re not on the same cinematic page. The problem was the execution.
There were two creative kills in the whole film, and only a small handful of kills altogether. The satirization of the theater camp kids only works if you murder them periodically and director and writer Jerome Sable makes his audience watch forty minute chunks with no death and dismemberment. So it’s almost just like watching a musical. A really really low budget, theater-camp quality, musical that begs questions like: The Phantom of the Opera already has masks in it, so why do they need a Kabuki interpretation? The tone of the film shifts halfway through so it’s no longer sunny and set in the large outside summer camp, instead spending many scenes in dimly lit dressing rooms and rehearsal chambers. An exceptionally large cast of annoying campers, ripe for the dismembering, is reduced to a few slightly older, more irritating options. It’s lazy, and eventually, the only thing keeping you watching is the suspense of whether or not the actress’s tits are going to pop out of the absurdly tight, strapless corset they thrust her into for the final half hour.
Despite the theater being a wonderful setting for some fancy stage kills like: having lights dropped on heads, flyline counterweights being used as bludgeons, prop swords being exchanged for real swords, rope mishaps, disappearances in the darkened house seating, falling from balconies, being thrown off catwalks, pyrotechnic misfirings, caught in trap doors and crushed, real blood confused for fake blood, yanked into the choir pit and ripped apart by a mob of angry musicians, smothered by curtains, kills occurring in silhouette behind the cyc, backs snapped in boobytrapped chairs, incinerated by dressing room lights, poisoned by tampered makeup kits, snakes hidden in congratulatory bouquets, mistaking killers for realistic costumes, hand grenades tossed on stage instead of roses, soundboard rigged to explode at certain cues, actor substituted for killers in the same mask, glow tape removed on circular stairs for deadly trips, blanks in prop gun replaced with kevlar-piercing tungsten carbide rounds, sniper operating the spotlight, strapped to a flyrail and flung violently to the ceiling, corpses going green in the green room, directors shouting, “cut” right as body parts are cut off, suicides following forced viewership of Chorusline, and raucous applause as the audience mistakes real violence for stage violence. Eyeballs gouged out. I don’t know; I don’t have many ideas. But I do know that at one point I was on the very fringe of the theater world and now I really just want to see those people freakishly and hideously obliterated by a psychopath one by one. And Stage Fright failed in that regard.