Review of 976-EVIL (1988) by William P — 12 Mar 2005

For the next month and a half at least, I've got Comcast cable. If you've missed the advertisements, Comcast is currently offering their new "on demand" programming, which is kind of like pay per view except that it starts when you want. The best part of this is that it's not limited to newer, first-run flicks. They've also got an assortment of older, less popular films that you can watch for free.

Since I love older, less popular films, I had to check it out. Imagine my glee when I found that I could order [i]976-EVIL[/i] any time I wanted for free! Living in the future is a great thing.

I hadn't seen [i]976-EVIL[/i] since I was a kid, and I'd always felt it was a lousy movie. After watching it again, over a decade later, I've finally confirmed it, but by now it's gotten some late '80s charms.

Former [i]Fright Night[/i] star and future gay porn actor Stephen Geoffreys stars as Hoax (!), a squirmy, anti-social, vest-wearing teenager who lives with his deranged, overly religious mother (Sandy Dennis in her second-to-last role) and his hunky cousin Spike, whom he has a weird sort of crush on. Hoax keeps suggesting that he and Spike run away together, but Spike is too busy calling the title number, a "horrorscope" line that gives him advice for $3.29 a minute.

We all know that this number is evil, as a detective (Jim Metzler) is trying to track down the maker of the line, and we see numerous people get phone calls from the "master of the dark" before getting offed. Hoax ends up using the phone service himself, and before you can saw [i]Evilspeak,[/i] he's starting to transform from a geeky, possibly gay dweeb to an uber-powerful, geeky demon that spouts bad Freddie Kruger-esque dialogue and sounds like an aging drag queen.

Speaking of aging drag queens, Sandy Dennis clearly seems to be having a ball as Hoax's religious nut mother. She helps and squeals in her curly blonde wig and puffy shirt, yelling about sin and salvation as through Piper Laurie's performance in[i] Carrie[/i] was too subtle. It's an amazing performace, and coupled with Geoffrey's weird, cackling gay demon-dork, it almost makes the film campy fun.

(You think I'm making this gay thing up? C'mon. Hoax is clearly overly affectionate towards his cousin, gets jealous of his girlfriend to the point where he kills her, and has a telescope pointed into his room! This would make it obvious even if the film didn't have a scene where five guys play a losing game of strip poker with one, rather homely, girl.).

Director Robert Englund (in his sole, to date, director's credit) does the best that he can, but nobody's about to make any sense out of this material. Jim Metzler pulls off the best performance, and seems to be clearly in on the joke, but others, like Patrick O'Bryan (as Spike) and the normally reliable Lezlie Deane (as the girlfriend) can't keep up with the film's obviously campy vibe and their scenes may just cause your eyes to glaze over.

There's the token nods to the whole concept of the film, the then-popular 976 number craze, including a great sequence where the man who runs it (Robert Picardo) introduces the director to the array of fun folks that man his lines. There's also some half-assed gore, though Hoax's heart-ripping attack on two (half-naked) guys is offscreen. (He returns to their poker game and props their organs on the table with the line "Can I enter the game.. with two hearts?" Unnnnnngh.).

For a bad '80s horror movie night, pair this with[i] Evilspeak[/i] or [i]Twisted Brain[/i] and have yourself a goofy, silly, dork-vs.-the-jocks-and-the-forces-of-evil good time. As a pure horror movie, the only thing that's scary about [i]976-EVIL[/i] are Sandy Dennis' outfits.

(Patrick O'Bryan is the only continuing factor in [i]976-EVIL 2: The Astral Factor[/i], which I recall being even worse. Hopefully, that'll pop up on "in demand" soon enough.).