The troupe of a small provincial theater is rehearsing a promising new production, according to the plot of which the killer maniac Irving Wallace commits a massacre. Ironically, the real prototype of their hero on the same night escapes from the psychiatric hospital and turns out to be straight on the stage, where he begins to kill the participants of the acting ensemble quite for real.
The film opens with a spectacular scene of strangling a woman, who in the end appears before us as part of a theatrical production. Since the characters rehearse the musical, the opening stage is also a dance number, and the background sounds chic synthwave from Simon Boswell, whose music you could hear in Demons and Giant Bava Jr. As always with Boswell, OST films are spectacular synthesizer passages, the music will definitely appeal to all fans of retrowave.
Despite the fact that the picture has been rocking for quite a long time, in the future the viewer will be more than rewarded with an abundance of slaughter and blood, and even the maniac in the film has a completely chic image, he wears a black jumpsuit and an owl mask. Murders are quite diverse, and the very first such episode with the exit of a woman from a car was made, as they say, with knowledge of the case.
For the first half an hour, the tape tries to seem atmospheric jallo, which it does well, acquainting the viewer with the title characters, and the main action begins already in the second half of the film, with an episode of the maniac’s penetration into the theater and the first murder on stage. Soavi and cameraman Renato Tafuri brilliantly play with light and interesting cinematic techniques, such as a first-person view, to cause the viewer to feel panic and tension, and skillfully (and somehow even Hitchcockian) filmed murder scenes complement the overall picture. They are remembered almost everything - whether it's cutting a woman in half, killing with a drill, the final passage with a chainsaw or a very cleverly invented trick, when the characters kill their friend, on whom the maniac put on his mask.
Amazingly, Soavi included some references to the tapes of his Italian teachers - for example, it was unexpected and pleasant to see in one of the scenes a portrait of George Eastman as Anthropophagus from the picture of the same name by Joe D'Amato. The very entourage of the film seems to suggest the presence of various kinds of cinematic homages, done brilliantly! The general oppressive impression is diluted only by the ridiculously comical line of two misguided policemen who throughout the story sat in a car next to the theater building and saw nothing, although the killer was right under their noses.
Closer to the final, the movie changes the vector, turning from a slasher again into an almost pure-blooded jallo and a kind of mono performance of the main character, who remains alone and fights off the maniac - this scene with the ascent of the killer on the stage is made in the best traditions of the great master Dario Argento! This is a very intense and sophisticated episode.
Aquarius boasts cool practical effects, a truly creepy butcher maniac, drive music and chic directing! Soavi for his debut immediately took an impossible big bar, to the level of which he will also come close in a few years, when another of his masterpieces – monster-movie “Cathedral” will be released. As you know, this is a different story.
Back in 1986, the maestro of Italian film exploitation Aristide Massaccesi asked the talented actor and screenwriter Luigi Montefiori to write two scripts. One for Montefiori himself, the second for the young and promising Michele Soavi. The first script intended for Montefiori himself was Aquarius (aka Fear Scene). But problems with a newly opened restaurant in Rome prevented Montefiori from making the film, so he gave his script to Soavi. And so the movie Aquarius was born. However, Soavi himself said in an interview that the film was very different from his original script. Whatever it was, it was a good job.
Although Aquarius was an inexpensive, mediocre slasher, born at the end of Italian genre cinema (Soavi himself said that he came to the cinema too late), he still played a large role in the development of the Massaccesi film company Filmirage. With his debut film, Soavi showed that although the genre is dying, it is still possible to pour fresh blood into it, attracting young talents like himself to the director's chair.
The movie is curious. It is interesting because Michele Soavi made his debut quite well, successfully using his extensive experience on the set, where he landed very early, gaining a mind-mind assistant from many talented Italian directors with names important for the genre. The aspiring young director tried to grab the fashion trend with a focus on the West, removing an English-language slasher. However, working with a similar direction, Soavi, who can be recognized as an episodic police officer who talks about his similarity with James Dean, still managed to move away from the entourage of the prevailing mass of American templates about faceless teenagers who do not know life and give out naive conclusions of overgrown schoolchildren, playing a straightforward, but still atmospheric meat grinder.
We have an older story with well-written participants of events, endowed with characters and understandable motivation. Each character is brought to the viewer in small, but capacious strokes, allowing you to identify the characters by reliable members of the theater troupe with all sorts of relationships in the creative team. It is difficult to find the root cause of such luck between the seemingly memorable cast and a recognizable screenwriter. Fortunately, the producer of “all porn-erotic Italy” Joe D’Amato did not interfere in the filming process, but only invited his friend George Eastman, responsible for writing the script, to the project. Of course, the two-meter actor did not limit himself to paperwork, having played all the scenes with the maniac when he is covered with a mask, because it is unforgivable to stand outside the frame with such a tall texture if you need a frightening villain. And the director, in turn, expressed gratitude for the work, putting a photo of a colleague in the dressing room, which will be noticed by the most attentive viewers.
The film, whose original title can be translated “Bradney”, is ideologically leaning towards madness, showing us the crazy world of theater, demonstrating the tense underside of stage art with cynicism, intrigue and working turmoil. False paraphernalia of the play and props deftly intertwined with real horror, personified by a mad actor who escaped from the clinic, who began to deal with lyceums. The simple plot - hello, slasher! - is perfectly framed by a memorable background that allows you to decorate the trivial plot with a specific color with cluttered dressing rooms, dark backstage, a labyrinth of working metal structures, details of props and colorful lights of the ramp, where it is so easy to get lost once and for all. With a slight irony, the unshakable rules of the genre are played, requiring the characters to follow the fate, stupidly and colorfully dying next to a sophisticated silent sadist in a mask, because the events take place on stage, and the heroes serve the Melpomene muse, playing their own life within the theater at the behest of evil rock and locked doors. The chosen entourage of the stage allows you to saturate the maniac’s hands with a mass of tools left by the stage workers, so the voluminous bloodthirsty arsenal is clearly determined and will please fans of fake delights who appreciate the like in the genre. No less well conveyed the atmosphere of claustrophobia of the endless nightmarish night in a confined space with bad weather outside, and the “compulsory” nudity is commendablely delicate, demonstrating only the beauty of women’s legs and the plasticity of dance.
Technically, the film pleases with a skillful combination of memorable music by composer Simon Boswell and a nimble camera operator, supporting the general carnival mood of creative madness non-stop with a quick montage under rhythmic motifs. However, alas, the picture is extremely simple due to the directing course on the Americanized slasher, when only the first third of the timekeeping is devoted to interesting relationships of characters, and everything else is given to typical self-harm, devoid of any hint of a detective. Apogee is phenomenally silent, reminiscent of the film adaptation of the game of hide-and-seek heroine with a maniac. Is it necessary to mention artistic nonsense, if the word “slasher” runs so often in the text? I think that in every first film of this kind, all hospital and police officers are portrayed as terrible fools whose blatant reckless behavior motivates villains to do their terrible deeds with impunity. There is plenty of this, including the main characters who do not differ in particular logic, clearly not accidentally living in the same world of “delusions” with a madman, where anyone can easily enter the psychiatric clinic, demanding that the doctor examine the ankle, the maniac easily go outside, and the sick leg allows you to run, despite the previous scene, when the heroine claimed that she could not move. Locked characters dream of getting out, screaming and sliding away from the maniac, but suddenly seeing him in the distance, they begin to chase him themselves. Paraphrasing the words of the classic, one can lament for a long time that about how many discoveries of fools the spirit prepares a slasher! Therefore, it is possible to evaluate the positive performance only within the narrow framework of the cyclical meat grinder, noting the juicy observance of dry American templates by Italian talent, who was still young, for the first time reconciled to the responsible director's chair. Slasher and even more - the debut slasher he turned out to be successful, delighting with the atmosphere, music, theatrical background, but the entire wide genre field he notices is too much to be an intriguing action story that can be reviewed several times.
7 out of 10
In what year and how old I was when watching “Aquarius” I do not know, but what I know for sure – we are one year of release. Who knew how I searched for this film, how much he scared me, he was from birth bloodthirsty and evil, cut my imagination mercilessly, so that I was sure that there was a woman in the soul with a severed breast, this severed breast I finished in my head, and this picture literally settled in it, and now at the end of December I watch my worst nightmare of childhood and see that the breasts are all in place, that all this is a theater with unknown actors, and the maniac walks with the head of an owl, and not a bear, as I remember it in my childhood. And those are my two mistakes: a severed chest and a bear head. After that, I’ll add the key search, and I’ll find the wrong movie, Girls Disappear (1982). I will watch it five years ago, I will take on faith, but not with my heart, that this is exactly the movie, I will continue to live, meeting a new movie, but with a sense of disappointment - did I make it all up for myself, this is a terrible movie, or did I dream of it? And at the end of December, I, not waiting for anything, not anticipating, just press the file, open THE MOVIE.
The head of the owl, something starts to move. Then it fades. I see the key door. Still quiet. The girls come back from the hospital and park. One gets back in the car. Keys fall. But when I was a kid, it rained, I talk from the movies. And it starts to rain. Like magic. Yes, I found you, my movie, quietly, without excitement, whispering in silence. No one can share that feeling with me. You need to stop being angry with people if they don’t understand you. Yeah, I'm smiling, I've stopped. But what can I expect from Michele Soavi in 2015? When his cinema lived in the memories of his entire conscious life, how can I evaluate Aquarius as a work of cinema, compare when Aquarius for me is the very product of fear? It didn't work in 2015, owl head, aggressive actors, tough murder scenes, quick at one-two-three. It shouldn’t have worked, because that memory lives on in that distant time, continues to haunt me, and most interestingly, I didn’t choose it at the time, it seems that Aquarius chose me to predetermine my tastes in cinema. Thank him for that.
“Better a terrible end than a horror without an end.” – Ferdinand von Schill
Aquarius, or as it is called Stage Fear / Bloodbird, is one of the last representatives of the genre of Jallo. The genre in cinema began to develop in Italy in the early 60s and had characteristic features in the form of mentally ill maniacs, erotic scenes, bloody massacre, which was presented to the viewer from special angles: usually the main murders were shown by the "eyes of a maniac" and only the hands of the killer were visible in the frame.
"Jallo" - the child of Italian film masters of the third quarter of the 20th century. Dario Argento was one of the main creators of those years. The director of the film “Aquarius” Michele Soavi is a student of Argento, so who, if not him, had to prolong the life of the dying genre. This film became the debut in a big movie for Soavi, this can explain the desire of the debutant to bring some novelty to established standards. As a result, only the general concept of “jallo” is preserved in “Aquarius” – fewer scenes of violence are shown in the first person, less eroticism. This film and some of Soavi's subsequent works are more like "slashers" - horror, usually American-made, having similarities with its Italian predecessor. The main feature of “Aquarius”, as it seemed to me, is that the characters of the film are not typical short-lived youth, but adults. Heroes constantly think - yes, the simplicity of the script and blunders force the characters to make periodic not quite reasonable actions, but what just do not go for the sake of the spectacle. If the victims are smarter than the maniac, the movie will end before it starts. But it is also worth noting the moral component, some characters analyze their actions, let them through the prism of emotions. It's a plus movie.
Play actors satisfactory, does not cause negative emotions, but does not cause admiration. In general, there was an idea that if you trust Michele Soavi to revive the genre, which is still extinct, giving way to the “slashers”, while increasing the film budget significantly and the strength of the composition of a couple of actors who have a significant status in modern cinema, then you will get a very good thriller / horror. The only thing that would be worth saving is the musical accompaniment, it is chic in Aquarius, creates the right atmosphere, fascinates.
In general, the film is very good for its years, the scenes with the murder are shown well, with modern computer special effects certainly can not be compared, but it is worth remembering that at that time, to show the severed limb, it was necessary very much, as they say, to bother.
What I didn’t like most about this movie was the ending. I won’t spoil it, but it seemed illogical and unnecessary. I'm going to get a full score for that.
I was very interested in watching Aquarius, because I love slashers in any form, but especially classic ones - the late 70s, 80s. However, to my displeasure, Aquarius turned out to be a rather boring representative of the second wave of slashers.
The characteristic features of Aquarius are the lack of dynamics and weak entertainment, which is unthinkable for a slasher. Separately, it is worth disassembling the massacre for which such films are watched. It is also not surprising - everything is quite ordinary and without any highlight furnished.
No wonder the film is called “Aquarius” – on the viewer an hour and a half simply pour water! We are talking about a worthless narrative with no intrigue (the film is not interesting to watch), which for some reason is built according to the rules and canons of the classics of the genre.
Verdict. Unconvincing slasher.
Maniac Gallery: Michele Soavi's Worlds - Stage Fear
Michele Soavi made a beautiful slasher about the theater. The ambitious director rehearses with his colleagues a theatrical production - a play about a maniac. Coincidentally, a maniac who has gone mad in the past escapes from the hospital. Guided by the script of the picture, the maniac comes to the theater and begins the night of terrible murders.
By the way, I think a more correct translation of the film is not “Aquarius”, but “Madness”.
Of course, the film overlaps too much with Dario Argento’s The Horror at the Opera. In both cases, the directors offer the viewer a truly interesting spectacle.
Before us will be a sharp editing, an inventive maniac, a good staging of scenes and camera work. Yeah, and an enclosed space. All this together allows us to consider this film one of the best in its genre.
Michele Soavi began his directorial career so that Dario Argento had to worry, because the laurels of the Italian king of horrors could pass to his pupil.
And more... If you look at The Horror at the Opera, you will find not only the name of Michele Soavi, but also his name. And in the most crucial episode. I'm sure it's not for nothing!
In the end: A very well-made slasher Michele Soavi, who predetermined the appearance of "The Horror in the Opera" by Dario Argento. Soavi perfectly uses the advantages of a confined space (heroes are locked) and fully adheres to the classical canons of the slasher - most of the victims can not oppose the maniac.