Stage Fright

Not a fan of musicals at all but this is great! I love the makeup so much, the kills, masks, beautiful women, and the cast is excellent! I saw this once a few years ago and now loving it more. I must admit the original Stage Fright is better purely cause it doesn't have singing and it's a 80's cult masterpiece. It's really cool that Minnie Driver and Meat Loaf are in this; Douglas Smith, and Allie Macdonald is so damn pretty. Very good horror for what it is.

I enjoyed this film, but I was always going to enjoy a musical slasher film starring Meatloaf. That combination alone was enough for me to wait for this eagerly for months.

But, this was a little disappointing, the songs were a bit tame, the killings were boring, and the end reveal of the killer was too obvious in the first part of the film that it was never going to be a surprise, not only was it clear who the killer was, you could guess the 'hidden' motive too.

That said, however, it's still a musical slasher film starring meatloaf... if you like the sound of that, then you can't go to far wrong here.

Nothing is more important than musical theater, not even murder.

Camilla Swanson and her brother Buddy work at Center Stage, a summer camp for musical theater ingenues run by their guardian Ron McCall. This year the camp's final show will be The Haunting of the Opera, the musical their mother was the lead actress in when she was brutally murdered. Camilla wishes to be like her mother but auditions are cutthroat, literally, and there is a kabuki masked madmen with a murderous disdain for Broadway belting.

Stage Fright is a film set in a summer camp that can only be described as campy. It is ridiculous and funny, self-awaredly mocking all the musical theater stereotypes. Everyone sings Sondheim-esque tunes, even the killer, but his musical styling is about as far from the brassy Broadway musical theater genre as it can get.

With any hybrid genre film, one is typically more dominant than the other. Stage Fright is both horror and musical though forty minutes pass by where it is straight musical movie before any real carnage occurs. Luckily writer/director Jerome Sable keeps Stage Fright light and amusing.

Stage Fright makes you endure Glee-like show-tunes in order to get to the bloody massacre of these theater camp adolescents. The deaths in the film are not nearly as campy as the first half of the film, unfortunately, and I wanted them to be a bit more far-fetched and ridiculous. Stage Fright fulfills the niche market for musical theater horror.

Audiences will leave with the knowledge that it's not wrong to sing and dance when someone just died, the show must go on and nothing is more important than The Theatre.

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A snobby musical theater camp is terrorized by a blood-thirsty killer who hates musical theater.

The film has plenty of nice references early on to "Phantom of the Opera" and "Fantomas", with the "Phantom" theme throughout. Some have said the film draws from Argento's "Opera", but that is not necessarily the case. Beyond the generally theme (which is "Phantom"), there was very little "Opera".

The supporting cast is solid, with the amazing Meat Loaf and even a brief but powerful performance from Minnie Driver. Allie MacDonald as the lead is amazing, and do not be surprised if she gets big really fast after this.

The film widely received negative reviews, and the reasons are clear. The blend of humor, music and horror is not always flawless, and some of the songs are definitely better than others. Some probably enjoyed the heavy metal parts and disliked the rest (or vice versa). This is not on the same level as "Repo: The Genetic Opera", for example.

I can appreciate what they're trying to do here, namely, something a little different. One of the reasons I give M. Night Shyamalan more grace than most film fans is because of his willingness to take risks doing something unique. However, like several of Shyamalan's own films, this movie ends up just being a little silly, lacking heart.