by Gena Radcliffe, Staff Writer

I keep promising myself that some year I’m going to watch a horror movie for every holiday. Valentine’s Day is obviously covered, as is Halloween and Christmas. So is Mother’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day (if you count the Leprechaun movies, because why not), and even the Fourth of July (1996’s Uncle Sam). Closing the whole thing out would be, of course, 1980’s New Year’s Evil, the perfect way to toast the end of a glorious year wallowing in sleaze.

New Year’s Evil, directed by Emmett Alston and written by Leonard Neubauer, used to be known mostly for its lurid poster and VHS cover artwork, in which a glowering man tears through a calendar with a switchblade under a nonsensical tagline that reads “Don’t Dare Make New Year’s Resolutions…Unless You Plan to Live!”

So I…should make New Year’s resolutions then? I’m not sure. Anyway, though by this point it became apparent that slasher movies only required ample amounts of blood and nubile flesh, New Year’s Evil does make a rudimentary attempt at a plot. It’s New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, which is at various times either a hellscape populated entirely by punks and bikers, or mysteriously empty. The hottest event of the night is a televised punk and new wave concert hosted by popular DJ Diane “Blaze” Sullivan, played by Roz Kelly. Gen X’ers may recognize Kelly as Pinky Tuscadero, the love of Fonzie’s life on Happy Days, mostly because she looks and sounds exactly the same, speaking in a thick, old-school New York accent despite it taking place in Los Angeles.

Kelly, who talks like a Pink Lady and wears a series of outfits from the Jem & the Holograms Collection, might seem a puzzling choice to play an ultrahip icon of the L.A. punk scene, but that’s okay, because no one associated with this movie seems to know exactly what “punk rock” is, except that it’s a code that symbolizes something dangerously violent (for more on this, please enjoy the “punk rock” episodes of CHiPs and Quincy). The featured bands don’t play anything even remotely in the neighborhood of punk (in fact, one of them plays what can only be described as freeform instrumental blues), and the slam dancing extras in the audience were clearly listening to something else when they were being filmed, a la Crispin Glover actually dancing to “Back in Black” in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. But no matter, for all that it ultimately has to do with the plot, Blaze might as well be hosting a polka festival.

The show is barely underway when Blaze receives a threatening phone call from a man (played by Kip Niven) who calls himself “Evil.” Actually, let me correct that: he pronounces it “Eeeeeevillllll,” in the second silliest disguised voice effect in all of horror history (the first, of course, is the duck voice in New York Ripper). Carefully enunciating like he's teaching English as a second language at the same time, Eeevil tells Blaze that he’s going to kill one person as the clock strikes midnight in every time zone, recording their deaths as proof.

As opposed to other slasher movies of this era, we see Eeevil’s face nearly the whole time. He’s just a guy, without any sort of elaborate background story, and his motivation for committing a series of murders is, frankly, kind of weak in comparison to, say, revenge over a disabled child’s accidental death, or being born into the Cult of Thorn. The dual twists are (a) who Eeevil actually is, and (b) who’s helping him, and you’ll figure out both pretty quickly, especially (b), because from the minute this character appears on screen you can all but see Bugs Bunny standing behind him holding up a picture of a screw and a baseball.

After politely letting people know ahead of time what he plans to do, Eeevil goes about his business, and because this movie was made in 1980 he doesn’t have much trouble finding victims. He manages to get two women (one of whom claims she gets nervous diarrhea) to agree to leave a bar with him by telling them that he’s Erik Estrada’s business manager, even though he’s wearing a mustache that looks so fake all it’s missing is a plastic nose and glasses. It takes even less to convince a nurse (played by B-movie icon Taaffe O’Connell of Galaxy of Terror) to ignore her patients and slip away to an empty office with him: all he has to do is don hospital scrubs and produce a bottle of champagne. What can I say, it was a looser, more cocaine-driven time.

Unfortunately, Eeevil spends more time on his disguises than on coming up with creative kills. Save for one scene where he suffocates someone with a baggie full of weed (which turns out to be pretty easy because she doesn’t even attempt to fight back), the kills in New Year’s Evil are disappointingly dull. So too is the last twenty minutes or so, when villain and heroine finally confront each other, and the most exciting it gets is watching an elevator move up and down while the heroine does little else but moan and cry.

Still, the first hour is entertaining garbage, less a movie and more a collection of bizarre scenes cobbled together, such as a pair of psych ward nurses allowing their patients to noisily celebrate New Year’s, and another character ever-so-slowly pulling a pantyhose over his face for…reasons? It was filmed in three weeks, and absolutely looks like it, lacking the finesse of its predecessors Halloween and Friday the 13th. With a minimum of gore, however, it’s absolutely swell entertainment for a New Year’s Eve party, whether your party consists of dozens of people, or just you, a charcuterie board, and a cheese knife.