New Year’s Evil (1980)
Directed by Emmett Alston
Welcome to a time when movies had songs written exclusively to use the title in the chorus, nurses were sexy and smoked in the hospital hallways, and the host of a New Year’s Eve New Wave countdown show could be in her mid-40’s and still hip! Welcome to “New Year’s Evil”!
This is an interesting movie for a few reasons, not least of which is its use of a killer whose face is visible from the second kill on. It keeps the normal “whodunit” guessing game from taking over what is a pretty simple concept: man hates women, man kills women, man uses national holiday as motive to kill. We’re still left with a question as to who exactly the killer is, but anyone with half a brain, or whose seen more than one of these types of movies, can figure it out pretty quickly.
That’s not to say, however, that the killer doesn’t use a variety of disguises. He’s sort of the Sydney Bristow of serial killers, adopting looks such as male nurse, Hollywood power player, priest, and cop. Where he lacks imagination is in the name department, simply referring to himself as “Evil.” Not the most original, or flashy, of names, but hey, it gets the point across. I guess “Baby New Year” kind of lacked pizzazz. While making the trademark slasher-calls-his-ultimate-victim phone calls, he uses a pre-historic looking vocoder that resembles a long silver tongue depressor, attached to the world’s largest tape recorder. No seriously, it’s so big it includes a shoulder strap, which he rocks without a bit of self-consciousness. It really looks pretty ridiculous, especially since he carries it to every crime scene and casually (which I mean in the most sarcastic sense possible) reaches for the record button before each kill.
Speaking of rocking, our sort-of heroine, Diane “Blaze” Sullivan, is a glam rock Elvira-trannie cable tv host. She looks well beyond her prime and even comes complete with an adult son, Derrick, who we’ll get to in a moment, and a deadbeat, alcoholic, drug addict husband currently vacationing in Palm Springs. Her show, “Hollywood Hotline,” is a viewer call in request line, which also features a live New Wave band, and a mosh pit full of zonked out “punk” rockers, the kind you would only find in a movie like this one, or “Knights of the City.” All I’m saying is they’re very Hollywood. Kind of “Zoey 101” meets “The Warriors” with a dash of Ziggy Stardust. In other words, they’re not very threatening. Also, the sound crew on this movie miked the crowd scenes in a way that allows you to hear the shuffling of their feet over the songs. It sounds like a zombie horde invaded the party.
At any rate, it’s obvious fairly early on that Blaze is your typical self-involved showbiz type, but the actress (Roz Kelly) makes many attempts to give her character a touch of humanity, mostly in the scenes involving her disappointment of a son. The son, you see, is a struggling actor who has just landed a starring role in a television series called “Starship Earth.” Much to his chagrin, mom is not very interested in hearing about her son’s big break, and leaves him alone in her dressing room where he can freely sniff her stockings and then wear them on his face, all while complaining about the fact that people think he has mental problems and then looking at himself in the mirror and exclaiming “Now what do you think?” Umm, that you’re crazy, just like everyone else said. He pops some mystery pills, which explain this actor’s unbelievably flat, Quaalude heavy performance, and then I guess attempts to throw us off the trail of the killer’s identity, but this proves to be ultimately futile since WE ALREADY KNOW WHAT THE KILLER LOOKS LIKE! If you’re going to use a red herring, then don’t show us the real “Evil’s” face.
“Evil” racks up a nice body count of seven victims before his killing spree comes to an end. Each one is punctuated by a guitar riff that leads into the headlining band, “The Shadow’s”, set. It’s after the second murder that “Evil” begins calling into Blaze’s show and announcing his New Year’s Resolution to kill each time the new year is celebrated in a different time zone. There’s the nurse, who admits out loud, that she’s only known him (in his male nurse disguise) for ten minutes before trying to screw him in the supply closet. Then there’s a great scene involving two young actresses he picks up (in his Hollywood Player look) at a club, and proceeds to take to a “big party at Erik Estrada’s place” (HA! You can tell it’s 1980!). One of the girls is even asphyxiated with a giant bag of weed!
The movie starts to take a turn towards revealing the killer’s pathology around victim number 3. It’s in this scene, involving a girl he inadvertently kidnaps during a carjacking chase sequence with a biker gang, that we are introduced to the classic serial killer profile of domination and control. Initially, the girl begs for her life, but as she becomes more personalized, his knife (or phallic symbol if you’re so inclined) slowly goes limp. When she tries to take control by offering “to get it on” with him, she incites the source of his rage and his knife pops back up. It was an interesting scene, psychologically, in what otherwise seems like a simple slasher film.
This was another thing I enjoyed about “New Year’s Evil.” By not giving the killer a mask, and allowing us to watch his process while stalking his prey, we get a Ted Bundy-esque murderer instead of the usual supernatural, masked villain. The filmmakers take this idea a step further during later scenes when a psychologist, with an awesome speaking voice, explains that the killer hates women, which is evidenced by the way in which he mutilates their breasts after their deaths (something that occurs off-screen). Each woman, he explains, is “Evil’s” way of working himself up to his ultimate victim, Blaze, who is the representation of all the things he hates. He goes on to say that his use of the recordings and phone calls is an attempt to gain notoriety and infamy in the same way the Son of Sam and the Zodiac did.
All this talk comes to a head in the conclusion, when “Evil” finally confronts Blaze (who is wearing a fabulous red one-piece jumpsuit with black knee high boots) and explains that “ladies are not very nice people” because they are “manipulative, deceitful, immoral, and selfish,” and he’s tired of feeling “castrated” by them. Then he ties Blaze to the bottom of an elevator in a very creative torture sequence and announces that he’s going to start the New Year by “going to the Rose Bowl with my boy.”
Eventually, as we near the end, “Evil” does don a creepy as hell, pre-“Point Break,” Richard Nixon mask, but by this point it’s really not necessary other than to remind you that “hey he’s a mass murderer” and to throw in some last minute cheap scares. Overall, this is solid movie, and a fine addition to the genre of holiday themed slashers.
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