The best way to ring in 2015 is with an
appropriately themed movie, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get my
hands on a copy of the one I really wanted to review: Kathryn's
Bigelow's INSANELY underrated sci-fi film Strange Days.
Because some bastard movie studio hasn't felt it necessary to release
on blu-ray yet, COUGH COUGH Fox COUGH COUGH, that leaves me stuck
looking for another New Year's Eve film.
Let's see what our options are here...
we have Love Actually 2: New Year's Eve, which is one of those
EVER so delightful vignette-style movies about 300 different people
falling in love with each other while at the same time making you
PRAY it turns into a slasher movie at some point. Directed by
Schmaltz Master himself Garry Marshall, the film did win numerous
awards as the worst film of 2011, so that certainly makes it a
contender for me to review. Then there's 1999's End of Days,
an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie made when his career was rapidly on
the decline. It's a truly awful movie, but then again it does
feature a scene where Satan himself has a threesome with a mother and
her DAUGHTER set to the docile tones of Limp Bizkit, so perhaps we'll
save that one for another day.
Or how about another low budget 1980s
slasher film made by and starring almost no one you've ever heard of?
I mean, seeing as how that's fast becoming a tradition on this corner of the Intrawebs, I think that'd be a GREAT idea!
Stepping up to the plate is 1980's New Year's Evil, which I
just bet is going to be about a serial killer cutting up people on
New Year's Eve. That's just a wild guess, though. I am pretty
excited for this one though because it stars Roz Kelly, who is best
known for playing the badass Pinky Tuscadero on the television show
Happy Days. I am freaking IN LOVE with Pinky and have always
been disappointed that Kelly never had a bigger run in Hollywood, so
let's see how she did in one of her rare starring performances. Put
on your finest party clothes, pop a bottle of bubbly, and get ready
for A Ghoul Versus New Year's Evil!
We open with Diane “Blaze”
Sullivan, who is kind of the Dick Clark of the punk scene, preparing
to do a live New Year's Eve broadcast of her countdown show Hollywood
Hotline. She briefly calls one of her coworkers, Yvonne, learning
that her husband Richard won't be attending the night's festivities
because he is already WELL on the way to getting his party on.
Yvonne ends the call to finish getting ready... when she hears her
bathtub faucet is dripping. Ah geez, are we doing this already?!
We're not even two minutes in! We have Yvonne, a pretty black woman,
all by her lonesome in a horror movie. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Oh hi
there, slasher hiding in the shower! I'm not sure, but that might be
the quickest black death in a movie EVER.
This kicks us to the opening credits,
which comprise of a a VERY nice looking shot of a group of hard
partying punks driving down the nighttime streets of Los Angeles.
This single scene looks like it had a higher budget than the entirety
of Christmas Evil, which probably wouldn't surprise me if that
was the case. I really liked the look of the punks here too, they
looked very authentic thanks to some hardworking research from the
wardrobe department. The quality established here goes downhill
immediately though in the next scene where we get to meet Diane's
teenage son Derek, who is an aspiring actor that has just landed a
part on a TV show.
We quickly learn Diane is highly
neglectful towards her son as she's much more interested in HER
thing, barely listening to a word he's said. We get the sense
Derek's entire life has been like this, and it's turned him into a
creepy weirdo that will do anything for his beloved mother's
attention. GOSH, I wonder if he's the killer? On a side note,
Derek's actor is Grant Cramer, a name that should be recognizable if
you're a fan of movies about aliens that look like clowns killing
people. And really, who isn't? Doing some quick research about
Cramer, I learned he's gone on to produce films more than starring in
them, scoring hits with last year's Lone Survivor and the
recently reviewed November Man.
Diane leaves Derek alone in her hotel
room to kick off her show, where we see the punks from earlier
worshiping her in the crowd. She fields phone calls of people voting
what the song of the year should be, the scene changing to show a man
calling her from a phone booth. He's using some kind of device to
distort his voice, identifying himself as Evil. Actually, I'll let
him tell you himself.
“Call me... Eeeev-uhl!”
“Evil? You bad, honey?”“No, just... eeeev-uhl!”
So, I'm confused. Is he good? Diane
asks if he has a vote, but he replies he's much more interested in
killing someone close to her at midnight. The movie shows a brief
reaction shot of Derek watching this unfold on the TV, but I'm still
not ruling him out as part of whatever the hell's in store for us.
Diane hangs up, ordering her assistant Ernie to beef up security in
case Eeeev-uhl is for real. The next scene shows us Eeeev-uhl
sneaking into a mental hospital, only to run into a nurse.
Fortunately for him she's a 1980s Slutty Nurse, so he's EASILY able
to seduce her before stabbing her to death. This is done just as the
clock strikes midnight in Manhattan, because earlier the film set up
we have the four different time zones in the United States going on.
He calls Diane to update her on the
situation, letting her know he'll strike again in another hour when
the clock hits midnight in the central time zone. We then cut to a
complete and utter WHAT THE FUCK scene of Derek talking to himself in
the mirror, cutting up his mother's stockings, biting them, and then
putting them over his head. He mutters something to himself about a
“mental disorder”, which yeah, I totally believe right now.
Luckily for my sanity this is over soon, as we get another one of the
NUMEROUS padding scenes of a band playing live music on Diane's show.
After the song ends, Diane goes to the back where she learns from
one of the cops about the dead nurse.
Back to Eeeev-uhl, who is now rocking a
faux-moustache and a leisure suit, infiltrating a disco. He starts
talking up a lovely lady at the bar, who JUST HAPPENS to be a 1980s
Dumb Blonde. Damn, it is Eeeev-uhl's lucky night! Blonde, whom I
don't think gets a name, is played by Louisa Moritz, an actress of
many bit parts who is currently in the headlines for all the wrong
reasons. She is one of the seemingly five thousand women stepping
forward to claim Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them, and holy shit
did I just bring things down. Back to the review, post haste!
Leisure Suit Eeeev-uhl gets Blonde to
agree to leave the club with him so he can take her to a party
featuring Erik Estrada, which, all things considered, is probably
worth the risk. I mean come on, 1980s ERIK ESTRADA! The chance to
meet him was definitely worth the risk of getting your throat sliced
open. This is followed up with Band Padding Shot #73, where they're
playing a song called “Dumb Blondes”. Hahah, subtle movie, real
subtle.
She throws a slight wrench in his plans
by insisting she bring her roommate Lisa along, but he plays along
gracefully. This leads to a hilarious scene where the three are
driving down the street, Dumb Blonde droning on FOREVER about herself
while Eeeev-uhl has a look on his face that just screams “this
elaborate murder plan of mine is NOT worth this shit!”. Lisa has
to use the bathroom so they stop at a gas station, Eeeev-uhl pulling
a plastic bag out and suffocating Blonde with it just as the clock
hits midnight in Chicago. Lisa exits the station to find Eeeev-uhl's
car gone, following a trail of Blonde's shoes to a dumpster where
Eeeev-uhl jumps out and strangles her too. Didn't he tell Diane he
was only going to kill people close to her, or did I imagine that?
Things skip ahead a bit to Diane
already on the phone with Eeeev-uhl, learning of his latest kill.
The cops head out to the station, following a trail of blood to the
dumpster where they open it aaaaaaaaand a cat leaps out for a Cheap
Jump Scare trope. BOOOOOOOO! That was already played out by 1980!
They eventually find the bodies in the backyard of a nearby house,
Blonde's body hanging from a swing set and Lisa's body drifting down
a slide for an EXCELLENT jump scare that fully redeems the cat one.
I am rather enjoying this movie so far, it has some fantastically
macabre imagery and direction.
Eeeev-uhl finally has his first screw
up though, as after changing into a priest's outfit he accidentally
runs over a biker. The rest of his gang chases him into a drive-in
theater, where he jacks the car of a teenage couple smoking weed and
about to have sex. Damn kids NEVER learn in these freaking movies,
do they? Didn't they watch 1978's Halloween?! Eeeev-uhl throws the guy out and takes off with the girl in
the backseat, who begins to cry and plead for her life. This...
isn't as funny as when he was driving with Blonde. Premarital Sex
Girl finally jumps out of the car and runs for her life through a
conveniently placed forest for Horror Movie Trope number 17, yet
another that was older than the hills by the time this movie came
out.
He eventually corners her but the
police magically appear, forcing him to run before he can complete
the next kill of his tableau. The clock strikes midnight in
Colorado, but that's not enough to deter Eeeev-uhl who heads to the
Hollywood Hotline party. Inside the police inform Diane of their
latest security measures in a scene that's only memorable for Derek
lurking in the background, the stocking still over his head. What,
NO ONE notices this? They better have something special planned for
him, or else his existence in this film is REALLY going to piss me
off.
Exploiting the innate stupidity of
Horror Movie Cops, Eeeev-uhl is able to knock one out and impersonate
him to gain entrance to the party. The other cops find his body and
conclude that the killer “might” be inside the building,
assigning a guard to Diane at all times. MIGHT BE? Yeah, we have
this extremely dangerous killer on the loose who has said multiple
times he's going to kill Diane, so when they find a cop knocked out
and stripped out his uniform that MIGHT BE a sign he's in the
building? What did the police ever do to horror movie writers to
deserve the shabby treatment they get in these things?
Diane and her escort return to her room
so she can change, but the cop hears someone in the room so he draws
his gun. It turns out to just be Derek, who is no longer wearing the
stocking. He yells at his mother for always forgetting about him and
storms off, probably to go smell her underwear or something. The cop
waits outside the door while Diane begins to change, but there's
Eeeev-uhl appearing out of thin air with a knife in his hand. He's
also wearing a TERRIFYING Richard Nixon plastic mask, slowly
stripping it off to reveal his face. Instead of freaking the fuck
out, Diane chastises him for scaring her because he's... HER HUSBAND
Richard! Dun dun duuu- wait. What?
Diane asks Richard to find their son
and talk to him, hopefully on the topic of checking into that nice
mental hospital we saw earlier in the movie. On his way out of the
room, Diane's guard becomes suspicious of him since there's no way he
could have got into the hotel with their blockade around it. Things
get worse for Richard as the police find his car at the drive-in,
discovering it's registered to his name. Really? He used his OWN
CAR for his crimes? I know this is from an era before we had
surveillance cameras every five feet, but there were still license
plates back then. That shit can easily be checked, as we just saw.
But Richard seems to be on top of
things, as he somehow manages to hack into the elevator Diane and the
cop are riding to send it plummeting down, the impact knocking them
both out. Richard drags the cop away into another room, waking up
Diane so he can out himself as the killer. She asks the question
we're all thinking, “Why?”. His response is about as
disappointing as humanly possible, pretty much amounting to “blah
blah blah I'm crazy and all women suck.”. Sigh. You were doing SO
GOOD too, New Year's Evil.
He ends up chaining her underneath the
elevator, planning on raising it all the way up to give her time to
think about her crime of having a vagina, and then smashing her down
to her death. The shot of her going up floor after floor is AMAZING. T
he director of this film, Emmett Alston, began his career as a
cinematographer and DAMN does it show. As the descent to Diane's
death begins, the cops show up to get in a shootout with Richard.
One of the cops shoots the control panel he was hacking, causing the
elevator to stop before Diane joins Amanda Peet at the bottom of the shaft.
Richard realizes he is outgunned and
flees into the stairwell, the cops running after him. He makes it to
the roof but has nowhere to go, so he does the sane thing and puts
his Nixon mask back on before jumping off the ledge to his death.
That's a tad anticlimactic of a slasher death if ever I saw one, and
I totally have! Shock of shocks, Derek is among the first people to
surround his father's body. He pockets the Nixon mask, a VERY grim
look of determination now etched on his wacko face. We don't even
get a chance to speculate what he's going to do, because the very
next scene is Diane being loaded into an ambulance where we see he is
the driver, the real medic dead on the floor.
There's a problem with this though,
Derek is wearing the mask in FULL VIEW of the crowd, all of whom can
CLEARLY be seen looking at him through the windshield. Not a single
person thought this was a bit strange? I don't think medics even
wear costumes on Halloween, let alone New Year's Eve. Ah well, guess
that's Los Angeles for you. Derek looks maliciously into the camera
and drives the ambulance off as a DJ on the radio announces it is now
midnight in Hawaii.
Cue the credits.
Did this movie ever fall the fuck
apart. Up until the reveal of who Eeeev-uhl really was, this was a
pretty damn good movie. Nothing that's going to make you forget John
Carpenter's Halloween anytime soon, but for being one of the
endless slasher films that movie inspired, it was certainly head and
shoulders above pretty much all of them. This looked like several
million dollars went into it, all of the shots were great and
featured some razor sharp editing. I am taking off points for the
band scenes, but those almost entirely went away in the second half
so we'll call it even.
The acting was all around solid, with
Richard's actor, Kip Niven, definitely stealing the show. Even
though he was a vile monster, he was a charismatic one, making his
crimes all the more chilling. Roz Kelly was good, but sadly her
character was given almost nothing to do besides talk on the phone
and dance, so major missed opportunity there. Grant Cramer, making
his film debut, gave the worst performance but that's something else
you can probably blame on the script as his entire character made NO
FUCKING SENSE. Seriously, what was with the stockings?!
The end is where this film dive bombed
into Generic Slasher territory, with everything going off the rails
thanks to the obsession to have a twist at the cost of everything
else. Like I said in my last review, I have no problem with “crazy
for the sake of crazy”, but leave it at that! Whenever you try to
justify this behaviour is when the problems start compounding, and
this film is no exception. The film even had a pass here, as a
throwaway line said Richard spent some time in a sanitarium when he
was younger. Why not just have him stay there, escape, and go on a
killing spree? Why have him seemingly sane, planning out this overly
elaborate murder plan right under his wife's nose when there was ZERO
set up for it? That's the problem with almost all twists, something
I've been bitching about for nearly a year now.
STILL, this is yet another 1980s
slasher film I've give a recommendation to if you're a fan of the
genre. Very, VERY few look this professional, the filmmakers were
really trying here. This is honestly a film that if the fashions
weren't so dated, it could easily pass for a film made this
millennium. And hey, Roz Kelly fans could CERTAINLY do worse than a
film where she plays the tough Queen of Punk.
No comments:
Post a Comment