Stage Fright

Looking for a movie my wife would never want to see I came across this one on Amazon rime streaming movies. I really knew nothing about it but it seemed that it had a good chance of being entertaining. And it was!!

First there is Minnie Driver but she lasts only through the first couple of scenes as she is starring in a stage play that is a parody of "Phantom", complete with a bad guy wearing a mask. Her twins, a boy and a girl, are about 10 at that time.

Fast forward to 10 years later, the twins are working at a summer musical theater camp as the cooks. But when they decide to do a revival of their mother's fatal musical the daughter just has to try out for the lead, she has to honor her late mother.

It was good to see Meatloaf Aday as the camp director, he even has a couple of musical numbers. Man he was talented. But the biggest problem I had, even though this is a spoof movie, the young actress is not a particularly good singer. Pleasant, maybe, but nowhere near what would be required to do a Broadway role, which was the character's stated goal.

I enjoyed the movie, it has lots of gore and blood, in the spirit of a parody, but as something completely different I enjoyed it.

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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I liked that it reminded to those good old horror movies from the 90's and giving that kind of vibe. But also, the addition of the musical element wasn't bad because it made more fun. However, I still felt like they could've played more with the whole theater/play situation instead of shying away with crowd-full musicals. The deaths were good, and had some very real makeup effects, but as they prefer eased with the story, they kept getting tamer and less over the top. Overall the acting was good, and even though the story and the whole killer reveal wasn't very impressive, it still managed to involve me into the movie and just enjoy it. And finally, I liked how the ending evoked many other horror movies with the mirror scene, by giving it that sense of suspense and horror without feeling too cliché.

So that you know, there is a film out there about a summer camp for kids that's owned by Meat Loaf, with fully choreographed song and dance numbers – including lines like 'I'm gay, I'm gay but not in that way' - and a kabuki-masked, falsetto-screaming, guitar-squealing, knife-wielding slasher who hates musical theater and wants to kill the cast of a make-shift production of some-such copy-right-friendly version of 'Phantom of the Opera'. The gore was vivid, the laughs were steady, and I honestly don't think I need to report anything else to help you decide if this one is for you; it definitely has an audience and made for a very strange Late Night Picture Show.

My opinion on this movie changed SO many times over the course of just KNOWING about it. When I saw the trailer I was excited to see a movie that was basically a throwback to the old school horror films I grew up with... with more singing of course, but a throwback nonetheless. When I finally got the chance to watch it, I was a little disappointed for AT LEAST the first quarter, but it just kept building and building (mind you I don't like musicals at all so I was a bit out of my comfort zone). By the middle of the movie I was definitely glued to my screen, and when the killer finally made his grand entrance I couldn't help but to laugh out loud - in the best way. Anyway, to sum this movie up into three words, I'd have to say: Eccentric, fun, and HILARIOUS. Oh, and keep an eye out for them paying homage to a few classic horror icons. There aren't much, but if you're a junkie like me, they'll probably make you all giddy and excited. And finally, my best piece of advice when viewing this movie that no one ever seems to take - DON'T TAKE THIS MOVIE SERIOUSLY. If you do, you're gonna have a bad time...