Stage Fright (1987), aka Deliria, directed by Michele Soavi, Blue Underground remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including English 5.1 remaster and English, French and Spanish subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092576

Video encoded in two-pass 13.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available.

Subtitles converted to VobSub and repositioned.

Note : The directing debut of Dario Argento protégé Michele Soavi is definitely perfect, but it has several things going for it. The story is weak and the performances wildly uneven, but the killer's owl mask is creepy, there's some very nice camerawork, and the kills are satisfyingly nasty and sadistic. You also get to watch our old buddy Giovanni Lombardo Radice prance around in a unitard, Barbara Cupisti makes for a good scream queen (the actresses in this in general give it their all), and the ending is weird enough that it all kind of works somehow. As an Italian film shot in English, dialogue is weird and line readings are as over the top as you'd expect, but it's worth it for the chainsaw action and the visuals.

A theater troupe is rehearsing a bizarre musical about an owl-masked serial killer under the auspices of a tyrannical director Peter, but when Alicia sprains her ankle and has to go to the hospital with the help of Betty, a nearby mental facility for some reason seems to be a good option, and she comes into contact with a patient who used to be an actor before he went on a killing spree. Unbeknownst to the Scooby Thespians, he escapes and follows Alicia back, kills Betty, and gets locked in the theater with them. A couple of cops stationed outside after Betty's body is found prove totally useless, so our culprit dons the owl mask and gives a very dedicated performance as a theater serial killer, with the help of various power tools found around the building.

This remaster is fine, a little fuzzy and noisy, but it'll do. 5.1 track sounds fine. No commentary or anything, which I think is a bit of a shame, flawed films like this are often interesting to learn more about.

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