Ten Days of Terror!: Stage Fright

Film: Stage Fright
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

For the life of me, I don’t understand Italian horror movies. I know that films like Stage Fright (Deliria if you prefer) have a following, and from a purely visual standpoint, there’s a lot here to like. I’m not going to deny that having a killer running around in a giant owl mask isn’t a visual feast. But the plot of this movie borders not on incoherent but on nonsensical. Everybody acts like an idiot to make the plot work, and the world this film exists in is so divergent from the real world that I don’t know where to begin.

I mean that this movie nonsensical in the most immediate and complete way. For this plot to work, everyone involved in the story needs to be an idiot, the healthcare system of wherever this is needs to be run by 8-year-olds, and the police department is unable to count to 10 even with the full use of their fingers, including the thumbs. It is another film that seems to demonstrate the idea that Italian horror directors identify specific scenes they what to film first, and then cobble together other scenes to link them. Assume that the rest of this review is under a spoiler tag because we’ve got to go all the way to the end to really explore the stupid.

Black Mass, After a Fashion

Films: The Church (La Chiesa)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Readers who have been here long enough and seen enough reviews of Italian horror movies know what my issue is with the style. If you’re new here, it’s this: Italian horror movies are long on style and short on coherence. They typically don’t really follow any sort of plan. The vast majority of them appear to be several scenes that the writer and/or director really wanted to include, and then something approaching a plot was pieced together so that all of those scenes could appear in whatever the movie turned out to be. The Church (or La Chiesa in the original Italian) was written in part by often plot-free director Dario Argento, so I didn’t have a lot of hopes for it. Imagine my surprise when The Church turned out to have an actual coherent plot with a legitimate third act.

We’re going to start in the past, where a group of knights destroys an entire village alleged to be populated by devil worshippers. All of the bodies are dumped into a single pit, and as one of the bodies starts to move again, they are buried, and a huge cathedral is built over the site in the hopes of keeping the evil at bay. See, that’s a plot hook that makes a certain amount of sense! Amazing!

Wednesday Horror: Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore)

Film: Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Cemetery Man (also known as Dellamorte Dellamore) is a couple of things at the same time. It’s a bit of a cult film in that it’s the sort of film that film nerds and horror geeks know and not a lot of other people do. It’s also part of the subgenre of horror comedy. So far, so good. Where it hits a roadblock for me is that it’s also Italian horror, and there we have some potential problems. I don’t love Italian horror in general. It’s stylish, but often devoid of substance or even coherence. Dario Argento is the king of this; his films are visually fascinating and frequently make no sense on a basic plot level.

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) works more or less as the groundskeeper for a cemetery in Buffalora, Italy. He and his assistant Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro) dig the graves, put the bodies to rest and, after seven days, put many of them back in the grave when they rise again. Francesco doesn’t know if this is something happening only at his graveyard or at graveyards around the country or world. What he does know is that he seems to be the gatekeeper against a potentially rising horde of undead.

Off Script: The Devil's Daughter (1991)

Film: The Devil’s Daughter (The Sect; La Setta; Demons IV)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

One of the things I love about Italian horror and gialli is that the producers are never content with a single title. In the case of The Devil’s Daugther, the film is equally known as The Sect or La Setta. It was also marketed under the title Demons IV. It certainly makes it confusing from the point of view of someone looking to watch the film; which title is the one to search under?

In fact, I initially started watching a made-for-TV movie called The Devil’s Daughter before I realized that it wasn’t the one I was looking for. No, the Fangoria 101 Unheralded Horror Movies list is going to focus more on the gore, which means we’re instead looking at a film from the early ‘90s produced by Dario Argento. Let’s be straight here—the Argento-backed film is going to appeal to Fangoria fans a lot more than something made for television.