New Year's Evil is one hour and 24 minutes long. That's one hour and 24 minutes of my life that I'm not going to be able to get back without the aid of time travel, unfortunately, because this movie is dull. There is absolutely no suspense to it whatsoever - the murders are all done off-screen, we follow the killer more than we follow the supposed protagonist, and there's not even any tension over who the killer is because you can work it out within the first ten minutes (less if you look at the IMDB page, which ouright states it). But New Year's-themed horror films are somewhat thin on the ground, and so here we are.
Diane Sullivan is the host of a "punk"/New Wave music show going out on New Year's Eve. She's also a diva who doesn't have any time for her son (and is probably a little too old to be a popular New Wave VJ at that) and is solely concerned with how her show will go. At the start of the show, however, a mysterious caller rings in calling himself "Evil" and promising to murder someone as midnight hits in each US time zone. Who could this killer be? A crazed stalker? A religious nut? Her quite-obviously deranged son? Her husband who is apparently in Palm Springs for the night- Yes, it's the husband. Gosh, glad they didn't keep us in suspense too long there; I don't think my heart could have taken it.
So most of the film just follows the husband around as he quick-changes into numerous disguises (my favourite was the one where he was Tom Selleck by way of Saturday Night Fever), picks his victims and then kills them. All the murders take place off-screen as well - the most we see is a bloodied knife and hand making a stabbing motion, and the posed bodies when other people find them, so the film doesn't even have enough in it to tickle the average gorehound's fancy. While we're not following him around, we occasionally cut back to Diane/"Blaze" as she's getting updates from the police or taking calls from "Evil" about what he's been up to. At least in these scenes we do get some relatively good New Wave music though. We also get occasional scenes of her son Derek, who's quite clearly as snooker loopy as his father, popping pills and wandering around with a red stocking over his head, but no actual explanation as to just what the hell he's doing. Is he supposed to be a viable suspect? Well it doesn't work because we've (a) seen the killer and we know it's not him; and (b) even if we hadn't seen the killer we saw him watching his mother's show live when the killer called in.
Eventually husband and wife are united as Richard tells Diane why he's done all this, and his reason turns out to be the old horror movie chestnut of hating women and having some distinctly Freudian ways of thinking (at this rate I'm going to need a 'Freud in Horror' category). You see, Richard thinks Diane is "castrating" him and their son and so he's decided to kill her so that her can take his son to a ball game or something. Then there's a police shootout, Richard jumps off a roof to his death... and there's still 20 minutes of this film to go? No, thankfully there's just an entirely predictable ending and then it turns out my copy had 15 minutes of trailers tacked on after it.
So that's New Year's Evil. A potentially good premise ruined by terrible pacing, a complete lack of tension and some really stupid characters. But good music. Happy New Year.
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