Stagefright: Aquarius

I just stumbled across a Japanese version of a film called "STAGEFRIGHT" a few days ago by popular Italian director, Michele Soavi. The Japanese title is "AQUARIUS". My decision to buy it was purely based on the cover image which shows a posterized owl head, and the main picture is a stage full of corpses with this dude in the middle wearing a big owl head. I thought it looked pretty cheesy, but I was morbidly curious and it was only 100 yen anyway.

It's actually not as bad as it looks. I didn't expect much to begin with, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's a pretty good stylish piece of 80's Italian slasher film. It kinda drags for the first half before all the killing starts, but gets better in the second half. Towards the end it gets pretty creepy and tense. The acting is far from awesome, it's actually pretty bad but that was pretty much the standard for 80's movies slasher movies of this type anyhow. All this aside, it's still worth watching at least once. The music is pretty much your standard 80's Goblin rip-off, with heavy synth, drum machine, phased guitar, etc...

There isn't much of a plot to this, and you never really get too close to the characters. The director is a complete ass, another guy is an over-the-top gay stereotype with a lisp, the other actors are pretty much just faceless victims.

Anyway the basic plot is that a killer wearing a big owl mask goes apeshit at a light-night rehearsal for a musical. How did he get the owl mask? OK, well, the killer is a guy who happened to break out of an insane asylum the same night and he goes to the rehearsal and kills the gay guy, hides his body, then steals his costume, including the owl head.

All the actors become trapped in the building when the key is lost, and the only person who knows where it is has been murdered. The reason she has the only key is because the director is a major hard-ass and makes them work all night by locking them in the building.

For the first 40 minutes or so, the characters pretty much just stand around and talk or complain about nothing in particular, or rehearse their shitty musical. But once Mr. Owlhead comes into the picture, it doesn't take long for him to polish everyone off. The murder scenes are pretty well done, with the FX being pretty mediocre: pick-axe through the mouth, stabbing, chainsawing, drill impalation, an axe decapitation and a chick gets ripped in half.

One of the best scenes involves a stabbing during a rehearsal of the play. The killer (the guy who escapes from the mental institution) is mistaken for the gay actor in the play, and proceeds to stab the victim in front of everyone. It cuts between shots of the killer attacking her and close-ups of each of the witnesses faces, showing their confusion and horror.

The other memorable and somewhat famous scene of the killer hanging around on the stage with his victims is pretty creepy. It ends with him sitting down and stroking a cat, with his victims lying all over the stage, and a fan blowing feathers around the stage with music playing in the background. It has little meaning, but it's still pretty awesome.

Anyway, check it out. It should also be noted that this director worked with Dario Argento on a few of his films, so I think he got his "basic training" from Argento.